Wernher von Braun

Chapter 1 · 1912 – 1930 The Telescope

Around 1928, a teenager ties to a child’s wagon the biggest fireworks rockets he has been able to buy. He has just seen one of the rocket cars that the Opel company is then showing to the German public, and he wants his own. He launches it on a crowded sidewalk and causes chaos. The police take the boy in, question him, then hand him over to his father to be disciplined. The father is a baron and a senior civil servant. The son’s name is Wernher von Braun. He has decided to devote his life to space travel.

A Prussian Baron

Wernher Magnus Maximilian von Braun is born on March 23, 1912, in Wirsitz, a small town in the Province of Posen, in the Kingdom of Prussia. The town is in Poland today. He is the second of three sons.

His father, Baron Magnus von Braun, born in 1878, is a civil servant and a conservative politician. He will serve as Minister of Agriculture under the Weimar Republic. His mother, Emmy von Quistorp, born in 1886, also comes from the nobility. The elder brother, Sigismund, will become a diplomat. The youngest bears his father’s name, Magnus. He will follow Wernher into rockets, and all the way to America.

The historian Michael Neufeld, of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, who wrote the standard biography of von Braun, describes the family in three words: aristocratic, very conservative, nationalist. He adds that for a Prussian baron, engineering was an unusual choice of career.

In 1915 the family moves to Berlin, where the father works at the Ministry of the Interior.

The Confirmation Present

It all begins with a present. For his confirmation, the boy receives a telescope from his mother. He develops a passion for astronomy. NASA’s official history of the Saturn rocket adds that he then writes an article about an imaginary trip to the Moon.

He will never forget that present. Decades later, Thomas Paine, who led NASA when men first walked on the Moon, would recall something von Braun had told him: it was a telescope, he said, that had turned his young eyes skyward.

The boy has other gifts. He learns the cello and the piano very early. For a time he wants to become a composer, and he takes lessons from the composer Paul Hindemith. He can play pieces by Bach and Beethoven from memory.

Oberth’s Book

From 1925 he is a boarder at Ettersburg Castle, near Weimar. He does poorly there in physics and mathematics.

It is there that he gets hold of a small book published in 1923: The Rocket into Planetary Space, by Hermann Oberth. The author, born in Transylvania, shows by calculation that a liquid-fueled rocket can leave the Earth. The book is full of equations.

NASA, in its biographical note on von Braun, sums up what followed in one sentence: the book prompted him to master calculus and trigonometry so that he could understand the physics of rocketry. The poor student of mathematics goes to work.

In 1928 his parents move him to another boarding school, on the North Sea island of Spiekeroog, run by the Hermann Lietz foundation. This is the time of Opel’s rocket cars and of the wagon launched on the sidewalk.

A Precise Dream

What the teenager wants, Neufeld states plainly: he is “obsessed” with space travel and driven by a dream, that of someday leading an expedition to the Moon.

That dream will take him far. It will lead him to build, for Hitler’s army, the first large rocket in history, manufactured by concentration camp prisoners. Then, for the United States, the rocket that carried men to the Moon. And in between, in a fort in the Texas desert, to calculate with a slide rule the first complete plan for a human voyage to Mars.

This book tells those three stories. They are one story.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, NASA SP-4206, ch. 1 (birth in Wirsitz, second of three sons, confirmation telescope, article about a trip to the Moon); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (reading Oberth, learning calculus); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project, 1991 edition (remark about the telescope); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (family background, dream of a lunar expedition). The dates and names of the parents and brothers, the move to Berlin, the music and the Hindemith lessons, the two boarding schools and the rocket wagon episode come from the English-language Wikipedia article “Wernher von Braun,” a tertiary source which relies in particular on Neufeld’s biography.

Chapter 2 · 1930 – 1932 The Rocket Society

There is a photograph taken in Berlin in August 1930. It shows a rocket and a group of men at the Chemisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the government’s chemical and technical institute, where a demonstration is being held that day. Standing to the right of the rocket is Hermann Oberth, the author of the book full of equations. Second from the right is an eighteen-year-old student. NASA reproduced the picture in its history of the Saturn rocket, with this caption: “youthful Wernher von Braun.”

The Society for Space Travel

In 1927, German enthusiasts had founded an association, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, the Society for Space Travel. It is known by its initials, the VfR. Oberth will serve as its president. It exchanges letters with similar societies founded in Britain and the United States.

Von Braun joins it. The sources disagree on the year: 1928 according to NASA’s biographical note, 1929 according to the history of the Marshall Center, 1930 according to the history of the Saturn rocket. What is certain is that in 1930 he is in Berlin, enrolled at the Charlottenburg Institute of Technology, and at the same time serving an apprenticeship in a machine factory in the city.

The Film Rocket

It is around a rocket built for the cinema that he first works alongside Oberth. The director Fritz Lang is making a film about a trip to the Moon, Woman in the Moon. Oberth is its scientific adviser. The script contains an invention with a great future: the countdown.

For the film’s publicity, Oberth and his helpers are to build a small rocket and launch it. It will never fly. They only manage to fire its engine on a test stand. But the history of the Saturn rocket notes that the experience was a stimulating one for the work crew, “including an 18-year-old student named Wernher von Braun.”

Von Braun spoke of this encounter all his life. Oberth, he said, had been the first who, when thinking about spaceships, grabbed a slide rule and presented mathematically analyzed concepts and designs. He added that he owed him “the guiding-star of my life,” and his first contact with the theory and practice of rocketry.

A Word to Piccard

That same year, 1930, the student attends a lecture by Professor Auguste Piccard, the pioneer of high-altitude balloon flight. Afterward he goes up to him and says: “You know, I plan on traveling to the Moon at some time.” Piccard is said to have answered with words of encouragement.

Student and Pilot

From June to October 1931, he spends a term at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In the spring of 1932, he receives his degree in mechanical engineering in Berlin.

He also wants to fly. To be admitted to the flying school at Berlin-Staaken, he joins a club while a student, the German Sport Aviation Association. He earns his pilot’s license in the summer of 1933. He described what followed himself, fourteen years later, in a sworn statement given to the U.S. Army: that year the club was absorbed into the National Socialist Flying Corps, and all its members were transferred automatically. He says he remained a member until about the summer of 1935.

In the meantime, Germany has changed its regime. And he has changed employers.

Officers at the Tests

The VfR amateurs’ engines often explode. Thomas Paine, summing up what von Braun had told him, speaks of “recurring, spectacular explosions.”

Someone is watching them. The German Army is interested in rockets. That interest has long been explained by a loophole in the Treaty of Versailles: signed in 1919, it forbade Germany long-range guns but said nothing about rockets. Michael Neufeld considers this explanation overrated, since the army was also working on weapons that the treaty did forbid. Above all, it was looking for a new, long-range weapon.

The man in charge of the matter is a thirty-five-year-old artillery captain with an engineering degree: Walter Dornberger. Even before finishing his degree, von Braun has come into contact with officers of the Army Ordnance department. That contact will decide everything.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (photograph of August 1930 and its caption, founding of the VfR in 1927, film and Oberth’s rocket, studies at Charlottenburg, apprenticeship, contacts with officers); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, NASA SP-4313, ch. I (amateur societies, Treaty of Versailles and M. Neufeld’s reservation, note 8); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun”; T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (explosions, Dornberger’s age); W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 16, 1947, FBI El Paso report, 1948 (flying club, pilot’s license, flying corps). The term in Zurich, the remark to Piccard and the tribute to Oberth come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). On Fritz Lang’s film, see the biography of Hermann Oberth on this site. Bilstein dates the film to 1928; it was released in 1929.

Chapter 3 · 1932 – 1937 One Mechanic

In the fall of 1932, Wernher von Braun is twenty years old and has an engineering degree. He signs on with the German Army. He is not a soldier: he is a civilian employee of the Ordnance department, charged with developing liquid-fueled rockets. To begin with, he has a single mechanic. In December, at the Kummersdorf proving ground south of Berlin, Captain Dornberger’s small group fires a liquid-propellant rocket engine on a test stand.

The Bargain

The bargain the army offers him is simple. Michael Neufeld sums it up: it will finance his doctoral dissertation, provided he works in secret on liquid-propellant rockets.

A few weeks later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler becomes chancellor. Von Braun, Neufeld writes, was a right-wing nationalist by upbringing, but seems to have taken little interest in Nazi ideology or anti-Semitism. As money begins to flow into rearmament, and eventually into rockets, he becomes more enthusiastic about the regime.

The Riding School

In the fall of 1933, he enrolls in an SS riding school in Berlin-Halensee. He stated so himself under oath in 1947. He went there twice a week to take lessons. The unit, he says, took part in no activity outside the riding school while he belonged to it. He leaves it in the summer of 1934.

Neufeld gives the context: at the time, Nazi organizations were pressing students who belonged to none of them to take part in paramilitary activities. NASA, in its biographical note, records the fact without comment: von Braun “was a member of an SS equestrian unit in 1933–34.”

A Doctor at Twenty-Two

His dissertation advances quickly. He completes it in two years. On July 27, 1934, the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin awards him a doctorate in physics. He is twenty-two.

The public title of his work is innocuous: it speaks of “combustion tests.” The real text bears another title, about the theoretical and experimental solution to the problem of the liquid-propellant rocket. The army classifies it. It will not be published until 1960.

Before the end of 1934, his group launches two liquid-fueled rockets of the A2 type. They climb to 2.2 and 3.5 kilometers. The letter A stands for the German word Aggregat, “assembly.” The series will go up to the A4. The world will know it by another name.

The Rocket Plane

In 1936, the Kummersdorf team tries mounting its engines on aircraft. The manufacturer Ernst Heinkel lends it planes. A test pilot, Erich Warsitz, is assigned to it. Warsitz recalled what von Braun said to him after showing him a test-stand run: “Are you with us and will you test the rocket in the air? Then, Warsitz, you will be a famous man. And later we will fly to the Moon—with you at the helm!”

In June 1937, at an airfield seventy kilometers east of Berlin, Warsitz shuts down his Heinkel’s piston engine in flight and continues on rocket power alone. He lands wheels-up, with the fuselage on fire. The test nevertheless proves that an aircraft can be flown by thrust from the rear.

Too Small

Kummersdorf is no longer enough. By 1935 it is clear that its facilities are too small for the machines being prepared. A place is needed from which to fire far, without hitting anything, and without being seen.

Thomas Paine recorded where the idea came from. It was von Braun who proposed the site: an island in the Baltic Sea where his father had hunted ducks. The place is called Peenemünde.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (civilian employee in 1932, a single mechanic, Kummersdorf); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (joined the organization in October 1932, test of December 1932, dissertation in two years, Kummersdorf inadequate); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (financing of the dissertation, attitude toward the regime, context of the riding school); W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 16, 1947 (SS riding school); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (doctorate of July 27, 1934, equestrian unit); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (choice of Peenemünde). The titles of the dissertation, the two A2 launches and the rocket-plane tests with E. Warsitz come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). The date of January 30, 1933, belongs to general history.

Chapter 4 · 1937 – 1942 Everything Under One Roof

The Peenemünde center covers some fifty square kilometers on the island of Usedom, on the Baltic coast. It takes its name from the Peene, the nearby river. The army and the air force share it. It has test stands, laboratories, workshops, housing, and the sea in front of it for the rockets to fall into. In 1936 there are about eighty researchers. Six years later, nearly five thousand people work there. Their technical director is twenty-five when he moves in.

Dornberger’s Formula

Dornberger has a formula to describe what he is building: “everything under one roof.” Research, testing and manufacturing are brought together in one place. The launch sites are three kilometers from the workshops. If a problem appears during manufacturing, the researchers are on hand.

Von Braun at first resists the idea. He has, he says, no experience in production. Then he comes around to it. Dornberger would later compare the whole to “a large private research institute combined with a production plant.”

The method has a simple reason, which Ernst Stuhlinger, one of the team’s physicists, gave many years later: “Nobody could build rockets at that time in Germany. Nobody knew how to build rocket motors. We had to develop it, and von Braun had gotten the team together.” Industry, for its part, did not want the work: conventional arms contracts paid better.

A Grid Organization

The young director recruits from the amateur societies, the universities and industry. Few of his recruits have ever touched a rocket. They are physicists, chemists, mechanical and electrical engineers. Leading professors become his laboratory directors. As for the universities, one of his engineers recalled, “We gave them the list of problems and they had to solve them.”

He devises an organization that can be drawn as a grid. On one axis, the major projects. On the other, the technical laboratories. Every project manager has direct access to all the laboratories. No laboratory depends on the fortunes of a single project. Twenty years later, the same scheme will be found in Alabama.

The testing proceeds by trial and error. From 1938 to 1942, hundreds of firings gradually improve stability, propulsion, the rudders placed in the engine’s jet, and radio guidance. Von Braun drew from it one of his most quoted lines: “Our main objective for a long time was to make it more dangerous to be in the target area than to be with the launch crew.”

The Party Card

It is at Peenemünde that the regime catches up with him.

In 1937, a few months after he moves there, he receives a letter asking him to join the National Socialist Party. Neufeld gives the facts: the application is dated November 12, 1937, and he receives membership number 5,738,692. Since it required little commitment, the historian writes, and saying no might damage his career, “he went along.” In a photograph from August 1938, he wears the swastika badge on his lapel.

He himself told it differently. In his sworn statement of 1947, he wrote: “In 1939, I was officially demanded to join the National Socialist Party.” He explained that he was already technical director, that the center’s work was attracting attention at higher levels, and that refusing “would have meant that I would have to abandon the work of my life.” He concluded: “My membership in the party did not involve any political activity.”

Two years separate the two dates. 1939 is the year the war began. 1937 is not. It is not known, Neufeld notes, whether the error was deliberate. He adds that there is no evidence that von Braun did anything in the party beyond paying his monthly dues.

The Black Uniform

In the spring of 1940, an SS colonel from Greifswald, the nearby town, comes to his office. His name is Müller. He brings, he says, an order from Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS: to urge von Braun to join. He will be given the rank of second lieutenant.

Von Braun described the scene in 1947. He answers that he is too busy with his rockets to spare time for politics. Müller replies that it will cost him no time at all, and that it is a very definite wish of Himmler’s. Von Braun asks for time to think.

He immediately goes to see Dornberger. Dornberger tells him that the SS has long been trying to get its “finger in the pie” of the rocket work. What should he do? The answer, according to von Braun, comes on the spot: if he wants to continue the work, he has no alternative but to accept.

After two letters of exhortation, he gives his consent. Two weeks later, a letter informs him that Himmler has appointed him second lieutenant. After that, he writes, he received a promotion by mail every year. By 1943 he is a major. He states that no one in the SS ever asked him to report to anyone or to do anything.

Neufeld does not dispute this account, but he draws another lesson from it. Lacking any convictions that would make him say no, he writes, von Braun once again went along, “although he probably could have made excuses to get out of it.”

The authors of the official history of the Marshall Center, published by NASA in 1999, weighed their words: “although he was not an ardent Nazi, he did hold rank as an SS officer.”

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (site, area, workforce); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (Dornberger’s formula, von Braun’s resistance, testimony of E. Stuhlinger and G. von Tiesenhausen, organization, tests from 1938 to 1942, remark about the target area, judgment on the “ardent Nazi”); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (letter of 1937, photograph of August 1938, judgment on joining the SS); W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 16, 1947 (account of joining the party and the SS). The date of November 12, 1937, the membership number and Neufeld’s remarks on the discrepancy in dates are cited from the English-language Wikipedia article, which relies on his 2007 biography.

Chapter 5 · 1942 – 1943 October 3, 1942

On October 3, 1942, at Peenemünde, a fourteen-meter rocket rises over the Baltic and, for the first time, completes a successful flight. It is the A4. It weighs about thirteen metric tons. Its engine burns alcohol and liquid oxygen and produces twenty-five tons of thrust. It can exceed five thousand kilometers an hour, climb to a hundred kilometers and carry a one-ton payload more than three hundred kilometers. No army in the world has anything like it.

What Was Celebrated That Day

Legend has it that Dornberger proclaimed, that day, the birth of the space age. The story was told many times after the war. Veterans of Peenemünde used it to answer their critics: they were more interested, they said, in science than in weapons, and spent their evenings talking about space travel.

The historians of the Marshall Center place this story among those that, through repetition, became “part of the legend.” They set against it the testimony of a man who was there: Eberhard Rees, von Braun’s closest lieutenant, at Peenemünde as later in Alabama. “Let us be very honest,” Rees said in 1985. “In Peenemünde we did not work in the field of space flight whatsoever. We worked directly on rockets and guided missiles, and only privately we talked in the evening about space flight. … A lot of people have talked about how strongly we worked in space flight and that just simply is not so.”

The A4 is a weapon. It was paid for as one.

Hitler

The war is turning against Germany. Hitler, Neufeld writes, soon approves mass production of the rocket, though it is far from mature. The order is dated December 22, 1942.

On July 7, 1943, von Braun shows him a color film of an A4 taking off. Hitler is enthusiastic. Shortly afterward, he personally confers on him the title of professor. The engineer is thirty-one.

He will meet Hitler four or five times. He will be decorated twice, including with the War Merit Cross.

What did he think of him? He explained himself in 1952, in a memoir article. He acknowledged that at the time he had “fared relatively rather well under totalitarianism.” He also wrote that to him and his colleagues Hitler was still only “a pompous fool with a Charlie Chaplin moustache,” and that he later saw him as “another Napoleon,” “wholly without scruples, a godless man who thought himself the only god.” These lines were written seven years after the fall of the regime, in the United States.

A Request to Marry

A document from January 1943 shows what the rank he had accepted meant in practice. Von Braun has just become engaged to a Berlin teacher, Dorothee Brill. As an SS officer, he requests permission to marry from the Race and Settlement Office, which answers to Himmler. The document exists: it is kept at the U.S. National Archives.

The marriage will not take place. The engagement is broken off because his mother opposes it.

And Goddard?

A question has often been asked: did the German rocket owe something to the American Robert Goddard, who had flown the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926? Goddard himself was convinced of it. Von Braun always denied it. “At no time in Germany did I or any of my associates ever see a Goddard patent,” he said. He paid tribute to his predecessor in 1963: Goddard’s rockets, he said, “may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail.”

The Labor Problem

Once mass production is decided, one question overrides all others: who will build the rockets? The Eastern Front, Neufeld writes, devours men. German labor is short everywhere.

The regime’s answer is the same as in the rest of its war economy. Neufeld names it: the brutal exploitation of foreign workers and concentration-camp inmates.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (dimensions and performance of the rocket); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (date of October 3, 1942, thrust, payload); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (weight, range); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (story turned legend, E. Rees’s testimony of 1985); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (Hitler’s decision, meetings with Hitler, request for permission to marry and its caption, labor). The order of December 22, 1942, the presentation of July 7, 1943, and the title of professor, the decoration, the quotations from the 1952 article, the fiancée’s name and the broken engagement, and the remarks about Goddard come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). On Goddard, see his biography on this site.

Chapter 6 · 1943 Prisoners and Bombs

On the night of August 17–18, 1943, nearly six hundred British bombers fly over the island of Usedom and drop eighteen hundred tons of bombs on Peenemünde. The raid kills 815 people. It destroys test stands and cuts transport links. Among the dead is Walter Thiel, the engineer who designed the A4’s engine. Von Braun escapes unharmed, as do most of his engineers.

Before the Raid: April and June

The bombing has remained in memory. Another date from the same year matters more to this story, and it was long passed over in silence.

In April 1943, the chief engineer of the Peenemünde factory, Arthur Rudolph, learns that concentration camp prisoners can be obtained for production. The historians of the Marshall Center write that he “enthusiastically endorsed their use” and helped win approval for their transfer. The first prisoners begin work in June. An SS camp is set up at Peenemünde itself. Other prisoners are sent, at the same time, to two other sites planned for production.

The idea came from higher up. It is attributed to an SS general, Hans Kammler, an engineer by training, who had built several camps.

Rudolph is one of von Braun’s closest associates. Twenty years later, in Alabama, he will manage the Moon rocket program for him.

And von Braun himself? On this precise point Neufeld is clear: at this stage, he had been out of the decision-making chain about camp laborers. But what followed, the historian adds, put him into direct contact with them, and with decisions about how to use them.

What the Raid Changed

British intelligence had worked out as early as May 1943 that rocket research was under way at Peenemünde. The August raid, the Marshall historians write, did little to disrupt V-2 production plans. But it precipitated a decision: nothing would be produced at Peenemünde.

Hitler and Himmler choose to concentrate manufacturing in an underground plant. The chosen site is in central Germany, in the Harz Mountains, near the town of Nordhausen. There is an old gypsum mine there. The factory will be called Mittelwerk, the “central works.” To supply it with workers, a concentration camp is opened next to it. Its name is Dora.

Peenemünde remains the test center. Von Braun will stay there almost until the end of the war.

Himmler’s Shadow

Since July 1943, Hitler’s interest in the rocket has aroused Himmler’s. The head of the SS sees the program as a way to expand his power. Production is now in his hands: it is Kammler who sets the underground factory’s schedules and allocates the rockets between testing and the firing units.

Neither Dornberger nor von Braun, the Marshall historians point out, has direct authority over the Mittelwerk. They can influence production only indirectly. But both, they add, visited the plant several times and observed conditions there.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (raid of August 17, 1943, and its toll, British intelligence, A. Rudolph’s role in April 1943, first prisoners in June, Himmler’s ambitions, SS authority over the Mittelwerk, visits by Dornberger and von Braun); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (camp at Peenemünde, other sites, von Braun’s place in the decisions, decision by Hitler and Himmler after the raid); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (transfer of production, von Braun remained at Peenemünde). The number of aircraft, the tonnage of bombs, the death of W. Thiel and the role of H. Kammler come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source).

Chapter 7 · 1943 – 1945 Dora

The factory runs a mile and a half into the hillside. It was an abandoned gypsum mine. The prisoners of the Dora camp enlarged it and fitted it out, underground. Then they assemble the rockets in it, under the orders of German technicians. Of the Mittelwerk’s ten thousand workers, nine out of ten are not German. Some twenty thousand people died in this complex of factories and camps: executed, or killed by starvation and disease. The figure appears in the official history of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, the center von Braun directed.

More Deaths in the Making Than at the Target

Production staggers into motion in the fall of 1943. It builds up in early 1944 and peaks at the end of that year and the beginning of 1945: between 650 and 850 rockets a month.

A comparison of figures is often quoted about this weapon. Its manufacture is said to have killed some twelve thousand people; its firings, some nine thousand. It would thus have killed more of those who built it than of those it was aimed at. The numbers vary from source to source; these come from an online encyclopedia.

NASA, in the biographical note it devotes today to its former director, uses these words: the plant relied on “enslaved labor,” and “brutal conditions” underground led to a high mortality rate.

What von Braun Acknowledged

He went there. He said so himself.

In the mid-1960s, former prisoners of Dora and Ellrich make accusations against him. He then gives his most detailed answer. He admits having visited the Mittelwerk on several occasions, summoned by the plant’s management, which wanted to hasten production. He maintains that his visits lasted a few hours, at most a day or two. He states that he never saw a prisoner beaten, hanged or otherwise killed. He concedes that in 1944 he learned that many prisoners had been killed and that others had died of mistreatment and malnutrition. He calls what he saw in the plant “repulsive.”

In February 1969 he testifies before a German judge, in a trial that will be discussed later. According to NASA, he states there that he traveled to the Nordhausen area some fifteen times between late 1943 and February 1945. These were mostly one-day visits. He came to pass on design changes decided at Peenemünde and acceptance criteria. Neufeld, for his part, speaks of a dozen visits to the plant. Before that court, he writes, von Braun admitted that he had seen terrible conditions underground; he never admitted seeing dead bodies or receiving the sabotage reports that led to prisoner hangings.

He denied ever having set foot in the camp itself.

What Former Prisoners Say

Survivors have said something else. Guy Morand, a French resistance fighter deported to Dora, testified in 1995 that after an apparent sabotage attempt, von Braun had ordered a prisoner to be flogged. Another Frenchman, Robert Cazabonne, stated that von Braun stood by as prisoners were hanged from chains suspended from cranes. The source that reports these two accounts adds that they may be a case of mistaken identity.

A former inmate of Buchenwald, Adam Cabala, wrote that the German scientists led by Professor von Braun saw everything, every day: the prisoners’ exhaustion, their work, their pain. Not once, he said, did von Braun protest. He is said to have passed close by the corpses piled up every day near the infirmary shed.

This book cannot decide between these accounts and von Braun’s denials. It reports them.

The Sadron Affair

Another episode is reported by Neufeld.

In the summer of 1944, von Braun tries to help a prisoner: the French physicist Charles Sadron. But at the same time he talks with the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He would like skilled prisoners transferred to Dora for a laboratory that he hopes Sadron will lead. Sadron refuses. Some men were apparently transferred.

That, Neufeld writes, “could further implicate him in crimes against humanity.” NASA goes in the same direction in a single sentence: von Braun “was well aware of the terrible conditions and was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labor.”

Could He Have Protested?

Von Braun later said that he was aware of how the prisoners were treated, but felt helpless to change the situation.

One of his engineers, Konrad Dannenberg, once answered a Huntsville newspaper that put the question to him. Had he protested, he said, “in my opinion, he would have been shot on the spot.” Dannenberg himself had been a member of the Nazi Party since 1932.

The Marshall historians looked for a fair sentence. Here it is: von Braun’s distance from direct responsibility for the use of slave labor “must be balanced by the fact that he was aware of its use and the conditions under which prisoners labored.”

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (underground plant, proportion of foreign workers, about 20,000 deaths, production rates, von Braun’s answer to former Dora-Ellrich prisoners after E. Stuhlinger and F. Ordway, final judgment); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (enslaved labor, 1969 testimony about some fifteen visits, awareness of conditions and involvement in decisions); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (a dozen visits, what he admitted and did not admit, Sadron affair and Buchenwald). The figures of 12,000 and 9,000 deaths, the denial concerning the camp, the testimony of G. Morand, R. Cazabonne and A. Cabala, the reservation about possible mistaken identity, the feeling of helplessness and K. Dannenberg’s answer come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source), which relies on the work of Neufeld and A. Sellier.

Chapter 8 · 1944 Two O’Clock in the Morning

One night in March 1944, at two o’clock in the morning, three Gestapo officers wake Wernher von Braun. They take him to Stettin and lock him in the secret police prison. For twelve days, he later said, he is not even told why. Then he learns that he is suspected of remarks hostile to the regime. The technical director of the rocket program is in a cell.

Half an Hour with Himmler

The affair began a few weeks earlier. Von Braun is summoned to Himmler’s headquarters in East Prussia. A French historian, André Sellier, himself a survivor of Dora, dates the meeting to February 1944.

The conversation lasts about half an hour. Von Braun gave his version in 1947. Himmler tells him he wants to speed up the rocket’s operational use. He knows, he adds, that the army is “full of red tape,” and what a “poor inventor” must suffer from it. He, Himmler, has “the open door to the Führer any time.” He can help better than anyone.

Von Braun replies that he has all the help he could wish for, that General Dornberger is the best boss he could imagine, and that any change in the organization of Peenemünde could only cause delay. He is dismissed without any decision being made. Himmler, he writes, was obviously disappointed. He informs Dornberger at once.

An Evening at an Engineer’s House

He had been under surveillance by the SS security service since October 1943. A secret report states that one evening in early March 1944, at an engineer’s house, von Braun and two of his colleagues, Klaus Riedel and Helmut Gröttrup, expressed regret that they were not working on a spaceship, and said that the war was going badly. A young dentist who informed for the SS repeated their remarks.

This is called “defeatism.” Another suspicion is added. Von Braun regularly flies an airplane provided by the government. He could use it to escape to England.

Neufeld summarizes the same facts less gently: von Braun allegedly made drunken remarks at a party about Germany’s likely defeat and his preference for building a “spaceship.”

Who Got Him Out

On his release, the accounts agree in broad outline and differ in detail.

According to von Braun, two days after he was told the charge, Dornberger walks into the prison and tells him he is free. On the way back, the general confides that he had a hard time of it. He had finally declared at Hitler’s headquarters that if the Gestapo did not release him, the rocket could not be made operational.

NASA’s history of the Saturn rocket speaks of two weeks in prison, an appearance before an SS court, and an intervention by Dornberger with Hitler himself. Neufeld writes ten days, and names two rescuers: Dornberger and the armaments minister, Albert Speer, who both testified that he was indispensable. Speer, in his memoirs, reports Hitler’s decision: von Braun was to be protected from all prosecution “as long as he is indispensable.”

Gröttrup, arrested with him, will lead the German engineers taken to the Soviet Union after the war. He appears in the life of Sergei Korolev.

Victim, or Protected?

This arrest is the only episode of his Nazi years that von Braun was later willing to talk about. Neufeld gives the reason: it made him look like a victim of the Nazis rather than a perpetrator.

The historian does not deny the danger he ran. The arrest, he thinks, crystallized von Braun’s alienation from the regime and from Hitler. He has a phrase to describe the road traveled until then: von Braun had “sleepwalked into a Faustian bargain” with the Nazis. They promised him all the money and power he wanted to build rockets, as long as he built them their way, for their purposes. He belatedly realized he was trapped.

The trap does not open. A few months later, Kammler, the SS general, is put in charge of the entire V-weapons program. Himmler has gotten what he wanted. And von Braun, Neufeld notes, is seen more often in SS uniform late in the war: it gave him some protection against Nazi true believers.

On this point too, his word has been contradicted. Shown a photograph of himself standing behind Himmler, he maintained that he had worn the uniform only that once. In 2002, a former SS officer stationed at Peenemünde told the BBC that he regularly wore it to official meetings.

Sources: W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 16, 1947 (meeting with Himmler, arrest at two in the morning, twelve days, release by Dornberger, Kammler’s appointment; the year of the meeting is illegible in the copy consulted, and the text places the arrest “approximately eight weeks” later); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (three agents, two weeks, SS court, intervention with Hitler); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (Himmler’s ambitions, sabotage charge); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (March 1944); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (remarks made, ten days, Dornberger and Speer, interpretation, uniform). The February 1944 meeting according to A. Sellier, the surveillance since October 1943, the evening and the dentist, the airplane, the date of March 14 or 15, Speer’s sentence, the photograph and the 2002 testimony come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). The same article states elsewhere, without a source, that von Braun was arrested in July 1943 for opposing the use of prisoners: none of the other sources confirms this version, which we set aside.

Chapter 9 · 1944 – 1945 The Vengeance Weapon

In September 1944, the A4 rocket is fired at cities for the first time. Propaganda has given it a new name: V-2, for Vergeltungswaffe 2, “retaliation weapon number two.” Between September 8, 1944, and March 27, 1945, 1,054 of these missiles fall on England. Others strike Paris and Antwerp. In all, Germany launches nearly three thousand.

A Weapon Without Equal, and a Failure

The V-2 flies at more than five thousand kilometers an hour. The Allies have nothing like it. An American officer, Lee James, was in London when they were falling. He told the Marshall historians about it much later. In the meantime, he had managed Saturn rocket programs in Alabama under von Braun.

Yet as a weapon, the V-2 is a failure. The Marshall historians call it “a military disappointment.” As many as two-thirds of the rockets, they write, exploded in mid-air before reaching their targets. The campaign against England perhaps did more to rally the British than to harm them. Nazi officials came to regret having concentrated on it at the expense of anti-aircraft rockets.

It had been put into production before it was mature, and assembled by men who were being starved.

The First Object in Space

The machine is nonetheless a first. On June 20, 1944, during a vertical test launch, an A4 climbs above one hundred kilometers. That is the altitude usually taken as the beginning of space. No man-made object had ever gone so high.

What He Said About It

Von Braun spoke of the dead in London. “I have very deep and sincere regret for the victims of the V-2 rockets,” he said, “but there were victims on both sides. … A war is a war, and when my country is at war, my duty is to help win that war.”

That is the line he held all his life, and which Neufeld sums up: an apolitical scientist who only wanted to go into space, and who had built missiles because it was his national duty in wartime.

Others judged it in their own way. In the early 1960s, a film told his life under the title I Aim at the Stars. Critics added a subtitle: “But Sometimes Hits London.”

The End of 1944

By late 1944, according to NASA, it is obvious to von Braun that Germany will be defeated and occupied. He begins planning for the postwar era.

Sources: T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (1,054 rockets on England, dates); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (London, Paris, Antwerp; speed; end of 1944); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (name of the weapon, nearly 3,000 launches); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I and V (military disappointment, mid-air explosions, officials’ regrets, L. James’s recollection, film and subtitle); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (line of defense). The launch of June 20, 1944, and the statement about the victims come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source); that article dates the first combat launch to September 7, 1944.

Chapter 10 · 1945 The Brother on a Bicycle

On May 2, 1945, two days after Hitler’s suicide, a young man rides a bicycle down an Alpine road near Reutte, in Austria. He is looking for American soldiers. He finds one, a private of the 44th Infantry Division, and approaches him in broken English: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender.” Magnus was chosen for this mission because of all the group he speaks the best English.

Stay or Leave

The decision goes back to the beginning of the year. The Red Army is advancing into Pomerania. It is only a hundred and sixty kilometers from Peenemünde. Von Braun secretly gathers his principal staff and puts the question to them: stay and wait for the Russians, or head south and surrender to the Americans? No one argues for staying.

One member of the group later summed up the reasoning with a frankness that spares no one: “We despised the French, we were mortally afraid of the Soviets, we did not believe the British could afford us, so that left the Americans.” The Marshall historians say the same thing more soberly: the Americans had suffered the least from the war, and might be the only ones able to afford to support rocket research.

The Convoy

They still have to be able to leave. The orders contradict each other. Kammler orders the team relocated to central Germany. An army commander orders them instead to stay and fight. Von Braun chooses Kammler’s order: it is the one that brings him closer to the Americans.

The evacuation begins at the end of January. Trains, trucks and cars carry tons of documents and hundreds of people, with their families, southward. The vehicles carry red and white placards bearing a vague formula: “Project for Special Disposition.” It is enough to get through army and Gestapo checkpoints. Von Braun acknowledged in 1947 that this was the only time he made use of his SS rank: to issue the transportation orders. At Peenemünde, records that cannot be taken are destroyed and the facilities are blown up.

The team settles again at Bleicherode, in the Harz, close to the underground factory. For a few more weeks they keep working there on making the rocket more accurate.

In March, the car carrying von Braun leaves the road: the driver has fallen asleep at the wheel. His left arm and shoulder are broken. He insists on being put in a cast so that he can leave the hospital. A month later his bones have to be broken again and reset. He will end the war with his arm in a cast.

Fourteen Tons of Paper

The rocket’s plans are the only asset these men have. Von Braun orders them hidden. Fourteen tons of numbered crates are taken down into an abandoned mine in the Harz. Its entrance is sealed with dynamite.

In early April, as the Allies push deeper into Germany, Kammler has the most important specialists, four hundred to four hundred and fifty men, moved by train to Oberammergau, in the Bavarian Alps. They are guarded by the SS. Von Braun persuades an SS major to disperse them among the neighboring villages, arguing that they would otherwise be an easy target for bombers.

The work has stopped. They wait.

“A Moral Decision”

After Magnus’s approach, the group surrenders. Wernher von Braun is there, with General Dornberger and several of the team’s leaders.

Before the press, von Braun immediately gives the choice a lofty meaning. “We knew that we had created a new means of warfare,” he says, “and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else.” He adds that only by surrendering such a weapon to people “guided by the Bible” could the world best be assured of being spared another conflict.

He is thirty-three. A month earlier, American soldiers had liberated the Dora camp.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (secret meeting, convoy and placards, Magnus’s bicycle mission and why he was chosen; Bilstein mistakenly writes “2 May 1944” and places the Harz in Bavaria); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (Soviet advance, reasons for the choice, evacuation at the end of January, destruction of the facilities, work near the Mittelwerk, 400 men at Oberammergau, 14 tons of documents, date of May 2, quotation about the French, the Soviets and the British); W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 1947 (use of his SS rank, Bleicherode); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (Reutte); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (surrender in the Austrian Alps, liberation of the camp in April 1945). The distance of 160 km, the conflicting orders, the car accident, the dispersal obtained at Oberammergau, Magnus’s words, the soldier’s unit and the statement to the press come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source).

Chapter 11 · 1945 Paperclip

Even before the war ended, an American major, Robert Staver, had worked in London with British intelligence to draw up a list. It named the German rocket technicians, ranked in order of importance. The first name on the list was Wernher von Braun.

A Hundred Rockets and Fourteen Tons

On the American side, an Ordnance colonel, Gervais Trichel, had been one of the few to think ahead about the fate of the German engineers. At the end of 1944 he had signed a contract with the General Electric Company to develop long-range missiles: Project Hermes. In March 1945 he instructs Colonel Holger Toftoy to find a hundred operational V-2 rockets and ship them to an army range at White Sands, New Mexico.

When the Americans discover the underground plant in the Harz, Staver is sent there. He finds rows of partially assembled rockets. Time is short: the agreements among the Allies give the Nordhausen area to the Soviets. Major James Hamill dispatches, in nine days, 341 rail cars carrying enough for a hundred V-2s to the port of Antwerp. Staver, for his part, persuades the Germans to show him the mine where the archives lie. He gets the fourteen tons of documents out just as the British, who are to occupy that sector, are setting up their roadblocks.

Morality and the Cold War

What to do with the men? The question, the Marshall historians write, was laden with political, military and moral overtones. Some fear a rebirth of German militarism. The Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, wants a punitive policy. And the most compelling moral argument concerns the Nazi Party and the forced labor at the Mittelwerk.

But another fear prevails: fear of the Soviet Union. The Russians and the British are also interested in German scientists. On July 6, 1945, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff launch a secret program, Project Overcast, soon renamed Paperclip. It authorizes the recruitment of up to 350 specialists.

Toftoy asks to bring over three hundred rocket specialists. He is granted a hundred. Von Braun maintains that the smallest useful group is 520 people. He nevertheless helps pare the list down to 127 names, making sure they represent every part of his organization. Everything is negotiated: will the contracts be permanent? may wives come along? what salaries? No one has firm answers.

What Was Hidden

The files were arranged. Neufeld writes it plainly: with the Cold War, Paperclip became a program of permanent immigration, which required that the dubious Nazi records of some, like von Braun, be covered up. The army classified his SS rank and the Nazi records of the hundred or so associates who came with him.

The Journey

In September 1945, seven Germans, including von Braun, arrive in the United States. The history of the Saturn rocket has them landing on September 29 at Fort Strong, an army post in Boston Harbor. Six of them go on to Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, to sort and translate the Peenemünde documents.

Von Braun crosses the country by train with Major Hamill. His destination is Fort Bliss, a large army post near El Paso, Texas. Toftoy intends to reassemble there what he calls “the world’s only experienced supersonic ballistic missile team.”

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (R. Staver’s list, G. Trichel and Hermes, H. Toftoy’s mission, J. Hamill’s rail cars, documents, moral debate, H. Morgenthau, Project Overcast-Paperclip of July 6, 1945, figures of 300, 100, 520 and 127, journey of September 1945, Aberdeen, train to Fort Bliss, Toftoy’s phrase); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (Fort Strong, September 29, 1945); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (records covered up, SS rank classified). The English-language Wikipedia article places the arrival of the first seven on September 20, 1945, at New Castle, Delaware, before their stay at Fort Strong.

Chapter 12 · 1945 – 1950 Prisoners of Peace

On February 7, 1946, Major Hamill sends Wernher von Braun a memorandum. The wall of Mr. Wiesman’s room has been broken through, he notes. The matter was not reported. And the pieces of the wall have evidently been distributed to various occupants of Barracks Number 1. The Marshall historians found the paper in the archives. It conveys the boarding-school atmosphere that prevails, deep in Texas, among the builders of the V-2.

Behind the Fence

By the spring of 1946, most of the selected Germans have arrived at Fort Bliss. They know the American Southwest only from the westerns of Karl May, a popular German novelist who set some of his stories in El Paso.

They are still wards of the army. They live in converted barracks, behind a fence. They may leave the post only with an American escort. They end up calling themselves, half jokingly, the “PoPs”: Prisoners of Peace.

Far from their families, ill at ease in the language, viewed with suspicion by the people of El Paso, they stick together. They hike in the nearby Organ Mountains, play chess, read, and play ball on a makeshift field between the barracks. It was there, the Marshall historians believe, that these men began to see themselves as a team.

An American described them in one phrase: “a president and 124 vice presidents.” The president is von Braun. The others accept him unequivocally as their leader, and he insists on his prerogatives. With Hamill, relations are often prickly. Von Braun resents it when the major questions his subordinates, gives them orders or transfers them without going through him. Several times he threatens to resign. Hamill ignores the threats, but leaves him in control of the team.

At Peenemünde he had commanded thousands of engineers. Here he answers to a twenty-six-year-old major. Money is scarce. “At Peenemünde we had been coddled,” he is reported to have said; “here you were counting pennies.”

The Desert V-2s

The work consists of flying the rockets brought back from Germany. The parts have arrived in disarray: packed by soldiers, shipped to New Orleans, reloaded onto freight cars, then onto trucks, and finally left in the open desert at White Sands. Working with General Electric, the Germans reassemble them. On April 16, 1946, the first American V-2 lifts off.

Of sixty-eight launches, forty-five succeed. The rockets bring back data on aerodynamics and the upper atmosphere. One of them strays toward Mexico and comes down harmlessly on a hillside near Ciudad Juárez. The Germans would later joke that they had launched the first American missile against a foreign nation. During these years, a V-2 topped by a small rocket, the WAC Corporal, climbs to nearly four hundred kilometers.

Juárez and Back

Relations with Colonel Toftoy are better. He exerts a calming influence on the group and works to meet its needs. Within a year, he wins the right for the families to come. A legal difficulty remains: these men entered the United States without passports or visas. In the spring of 1948, Toftoy and Hamill find an expedient. The Germans cross the border into Mexico and come back the same day with papers listing Ciudad Juárez as their port of departure and El Paso as their port of arrival. Their status is regularized.

Maria

Von Braun, meanwhile, has married. From Fort Bliss he had asked his father by letter for the hand of Maria von Quistorp, his first cousin on his mother’s side. He is allowed to go back to Germany. The wedding takes place on March 1, 1947, in a Lutheran church in Landshut, Bavaria. He is thirty-four; she is eighteen. He returns with his wife and his parents. In 1948 the FBI notes that his parents and his brother Magnus live at Fort Bliss, where Magnus works as a chemist. Their first daughter, Iris, is born at the Fort Bliss army hospital on December 8, 1948.

The Little White Church

His friends had called him a “merry heathen.” He had never shown any interest in religion. In Texas, he changes.

He told the story himself. One day a neighbor asks if he would like to go to church with him. He accepts, to see whether the American church is just a country club, as he has been led to expect. He finds a small white frame building in the hot sun, on a lot of browned grass, and a living community. For the first time, he says, he understands that religion is not a cathedral inherited from the past, or a quick prayer at the last minute.

Neufeld believes that he turned to religion to pacify his own conscience. Other scholars see in it the need for a new direction after the moral chaos of his years in the service of the Third Reich.

The Statement of June 1947

It is also at Fort Bliss, in June 1947, that he signs before an El Paso notary the sworn statement quoted in this book. The notary dates it June 15; the FBI says it was submitted on the 16th. In it he recounts his joining the party and the SS, the arrest of 1944, the evacuation of Peenemünde. He lists the other organizations of the regime he belonged to. He says not a word about the Mittelwerk or the prisoners.

The FBI report that reproduces the text concludes, according to a later source, that his party membership served to advance his career, or to protect himself.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (J. Hamill’s memorandum of February 7, 1946, and its wording, arrival in spring 1946, Karl May, restrictions, leisure, birth of a team, “a president and 124 vice presidents,” relations with Hamill, H. Toftoy’s role, families, Ciudad Juárez crossing in 1948, state of the parts, first launch of April 16, 1946, 45 successes out of 68, the stray rocket, note 38); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (Bumper series, 393 km); W. von Braun, sworn statement of June 1947 and FBI El Paso report, 1948 (content of the statement, dates, family at Fort Bliss). The nickname “PoPs,” Hamill’s age, the remark about money, the marriage proposal, the date and place of the wedding, Iris’s birth, the account of the conversion, the phrase “merry heathen,” the judgments of Neufeld and K. Oliver and the FBI’s conclusion come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). For the Bumper rocket’s altitude, Dunar and Waring give 250 miles, Bilstein 393 km. Wikipedia gives his age at the wedding as thirty-five; born on March 23, 1912, he was thirty-four.

Chapter 13 · 1947 – 1953 A Novel and a Slide Rule

In 1947 and 1948, at Fort Bliss, to relieve boredom, Wernher von Braun writes a novel. It tells of an expedition to Mars. He is an engineer, not a novelist: two historians, Frederick Ordway and Mitchell Sharpe, would judge in their book The Rocket Team that the manuscript “proved beyond doubt that its author was an imaginative scientist but an execrable manufacturer of plot and dialog.” Eighteen publishers reject it. The novel will not appear until 2006. But it has an appendix.

The Appendix

The novel’s appendix is a collection of mathematical proofs. Calculation after calculation, they justify the spacecraft and the plan of the expedition.

He later explained how he did it. Most of the calculations date from 1948. He worked on them in his spare time, and his only computational tool was a slide rule.

It is this appendix, not the novel, that will be published. It first appears in 1952 in a special issue of a German magazine, Weltraumfahrt, then the same year as a slim volume: Das Marsprojekt: Studie einer interplanetarischen Expedition. The University of Illinois Press publishes it in English in 1953 as The Mars Project.

The historian David Portree, in the study he wrote for NASA on fifty years of Mars planning, places it at the starting point of everything: at the beginning of serious Mars expedition planning in the United States, he writes, stands Wernher von Braun.

Against the Lone Inventor

The book opens with an attack. Von Braun mocks the tales that the first serious papers on space travel had spawned: a heroic inventor, surrounded by a little band of faithful followers, secretly builds a mysteriously streamlined space vessel in a remote back yard, and at midnight soars off into the solar system.

Since the development of the large liquid rocket, he replies, it has been clear that no back-yard inventor will ever reach space. It takes the coordinated might of scientists, technicians and organizers from very nearly every branch of science and industry: astronomers, physicians, mathematicians, engineers, chemists, test pilots, but also economists, businessmen, diplomats. What he learned in sending rockets to 250 miles, he adds, is that some ridiculously insignificant incident can jeopardize years of preparation.

And supposing a handful of men did reach Mars, what could they do there? A man walking importantly around his ship in a clumsy pressure suit makes a fine figure in a moving picture. He is unlikely to gather much useful data.

Columbus’s Three Ships

He then gives an example. In 1492, Columbus knew less about the far Atlantic than we know about the heavens. Yet he would not sail with fewer than three ships, and history tends to prove that he might never have returned had he entrusted his fate to a single one. So it is, von Braun concludes, with interplanetary exploration: “it must be done on the grand scale.”

That means great numbers of professionals, trained for years to cooperate unfailingly. Tons of rations, water, oxygen, instruments, vehicles. A flotilla of ships traveling in close formation, so that one can help another. Spare parts.

Without the Atom

Many enthusiasts believe that Mars will never be reached without atomic energy. Von Braun does not deny that it may someday propel spaceships: one must beware, he writes, of using the word “impossible” about technical developments. But all theories of atomic propulsion are still speculative, and he doubts that within twenty-five years it will be able to compete in cost with chemical propulsion.

He therefore sets out to prove that Mars can be reached with the ordinary chemical propellants of 1948. He chooses hydrazine and nitric acid, which remain liquid at normal temperatures. He deliberately avoids liquid hydrogen and oxygen, though they perform better: their extreme cold would complicate supply too much, and would rule out the collapsible synthetic tanks he wants to use.

The price of this choice is size. The book accepts it in a sentence that became famous: the logistic requirements for a large expedition to Mars “are no greater than those for a minor military operation extending over a limited theater of war.”

What He Does Not Know

The introduction ends with what he does not know, and that may be its most modern part.

We know, he writes, how to provide travelers with air, water, food and a proper temperature. We do not know whether a man can stay nearly three years away from the Earth and return in health of body and spirit. We do not know whether crews can be trained to withstand the spiritual hardships of such a voyage. We do not know whether cosmic radiation, far from Earth, will cause radiation sickness or blindness. We do not know what prolonged weightlessness will do. Will two ships have to be linked and rotated about each other to recreate gravity? Will the flotilla carry rotating “gravity cells” where each man could, a few hours a day, “feel his weight”?

Three quarters of a century later, these are still the questions of the engineers preparing for Mars.

Sources: D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950-2000, NASA, Monographs in Aerospace History 21, 2001, ch. 1 (novel of 1947–1948, Ordway and Sharpe’s judgment, publication of the appendix, von Braun’s place); W. von Braun, The Mars Project, University of Illinois Press, 1962 preface (calculations of 1948 with a slide rule) and introduction (lone inventor, Columbus, grand scale, the atom, propellants, minor military operation, unknowns); T. O. Paine, foreword to the 1991 edition (Weltraumfahrt, German title). The eighteen rejections and the novel’s publication in 2006 come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). The Mars Project is a copyrighted work: we summarize it and quote only short passages.

Chapter 14 · 1948 – 1953 Ten Ships, Seventy Men

Ten ships of nearly four thousand tons each, assembled in orbit around the Earth. Seventy men aboard. Nine hundred and fifty flights of ferry rockets to lift the parts and the propellant. An outbound voyage of eight months, a stay of more than a year, a return of eight more months: nearly three years in all. That, in figures, is the expedition von Braun calculated at Fort Bliss. Everything is worked out, from the first ferry to the last day.

The Ferries

It all starts on the ground. To lift parts into orbit, von Braun designs a three-stage ferry rocket whose last stage has wings. Once its cargo is delivered, that stage glides back down and lands like an airplane. The first two stages are recovered. The ferry is therefore reusable.

Each one takes off with more than five thousand tons of propellant to place some forty tons in orbit. A fleet of forty-six is needed. Each flies again ten days after its return, so that in eight months they make 950 flights. The whole consumes 5.32 million tons of propellant, at a cost von Braun estimates at five hundred million dollars.

To give an idea of the quantity, he makes a comparison that speaks to readers of 1952: during the six months of the Berlin Airlift, in 1948–1949, Allied aircraft burned about a tenth of that amount of aviation gasoline.

The Orbit of Departure

The ships are assembled in an orbit that circles the Earth in two hours. They are not streamlined, since they will never pass through an atmosphere: they are assemblages of girders and spheres. The tanks are collapsible envelopes, inflated once in place. The men live in personnel spheres.

Seven ships are built for the round trip. The other three will not come back: each carries, in place of a personnel sphere, a winged landing glider.

The Voyage

At the appointed time, the engines ignite. The flotilla leaves Earth orbit and sets out on an elliptical path around the Sun that touches the orbit of Mars at its farthest point. It is the route that costs the least propellant. The crews jettison the empty tanks and settle in for 260 days of weightlessness.

No robotic probe has gone before them. In 1948, von Braun does not foresee the machines that would do this work in place of men. The first humans to see Mars up close will therefore be these seventy.

On arrival, the engines brake the ships into orbit around the planet. Telescopes are then turned toward the equator to select a site for a base camp.

Landing on the Ice

The first landing site, however, is fixed before departure. One of the gliders detaches, slows in the atmosphere and lands on skids on one of the polar caps. Von Braun believes they are the only places on Mars where a smooth landing site is certain.

Then begins the most extraordinary episode of the plan. The crew abandons its glider on the ice and sets out on a 4,000-mile overland trek to the chosen site on the equator. There it builds a landing strip. The two other gliders, fitted with wheels, land on it with the rest of the exploration party. A skeleton crew stays in orbit to tend the ships. Portree notes that this approach to landing on Mars is unique to von Braun.

As soon as the wheels stop, the gliders’ wings are unbolted and their V-2-shaped fuselages are hoisted upright onto their tail fins, ready to take off in an emergency. A habitat is inflated. For four hundred days, the deserts of Mars are explored. Samples of Martian flora and fauna are collected, and the mysterious “canals” that astronomers had believed they could see since the late nineteenth century are studied.

Then the two fuselages take off, rejoin the ships in orbit, and everyone returns in the seven remaining ships. Near the Earth, the men descend to the ground in the winged stages of the ferries.

Antarctica as a Model

Why so many men and ships? Portree offers an explanation. Von Braun is thinking along the lines of the great polar expeditions of his day. Operation Highjump, in Antarctica in 1946–1947, included four thousand men, thirteen ships and twenty-three aircraft. Before satellites, polar explorers were cut off from the world: every specialist who might be needed had to be brought along. Without automation, large crews were also needed to fly the ships by hand.

On one point he was strikingly wrong. In 1952 he judged that television between the Earth and an expedition on the Moon would be impractical. Seventeen years later, Neil Armstrong’s first steps were watched live by five hundred million people. His last chapter, on radio, foresees that voice contact will be lost after about 160 days of travel; automatic telegraphy will then take over, and will remain possible at any distance between the Earth and Mars.

What Remains

His ships were never built. But Portree stresses that his principle has lasted through the following half century: in almost every Mars plan, propellant is the heaviest element, and von Braun sought to save it by choosing the least costly trajectory, even at the price of a long wait on the spot until the planets lined up again for the return. Specialists call this long-stay scheme a “conjunction-class” mission. The plan also took safety into account: if one ship failed, its crew could move to the others, at the price of some crowding.

Sources: D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 1 (“On the Grand Scale”: ten ships, 70 men, 950 flights, propellants, Berlin Airlift comparison, cost, ships and gliders, no robotic precursors, polar cap, 4,000-mile trek, upright fuselages, 400 days, canals, total duration, conjunction-class mission, Operation Highjump, television); W. von Braun, The Mars Project, introduction (two-hour orbit, organization of the flotilla, return in the ferries) and ch. F (radio); T. O. Paine, foreword to the 1991 edition (46 ferries, ten-day turnaround, 260-day voyage, 3,720 tons per ship). Portree gives the ferries’ propellants as “nitric acid and alcohol”; von Braun’s book gives hydrazine and nitric acid.

Chapter 15 · 1950 – 1955 The Watercress Capital

Huntsville, in northern Alabama, had long been a small cotton town. Its Chamber of Commerce proclaimed it the “Watercress Capital of the World” and the “Biggest Town on Earth for its Size.” A businessman emblazoned his building with a slogan: “Great is the Power of Cash.” This is where the army sends von Braun’s team. It will stay twenty years.

Two Arsenals for Sale

The war had rescued Huntsville from the Depression. In 1941 the army set up two plants there: a chemical weapons arsenal and an ammunition plant, Redstone. More than eleven thousand people worked in them. With peace, the jobs disappear, and the army puts the chemical arsenal’s land up for sale.

In 1949, General Toftoy is looking for a new location for the army’s rocket research. The commander of Fort Bliss rejects his plans for expansion, and money is short. In August, Toftoy visits Redstone. He likes the site. An Alabama senator who lives in Huntsville, John Sparkman, supports him. In October 1949 he wins the army’s approval.

The first Germans arrive in April 1950, with some trepidation. They have been warned that Alabama ranks near the bottom of the states in spending on education. But after the fence of Fort Bliss, it is a release. “Our freedom began for us,” Ernst Stuhlinger recalled. “We could live where we wanted to, we could buy or rent houses, buy property. We could send the children to any school we wanted to. We could go to church.” Hertha Heller, an engineer’s wife, remembered: “We liked Huntsville because it was green and reminded us of Germany.”

They join in the life of the town. They support a campaign for a public library and help found a symphony orchestra, in which several of them play. Von Braun and a few others form an astronomical society. When the Hellers’ house burns down, people bring clothing, furniture and money. “The generosity was unbelievable,” Hertha Heller said.

On April 15, 1955, at Huntsville High School, Wernher von Braun and forty members of his team, with their families, take the oath as citizens of the United States.

The Redstone

A few months after arriving, the team receives a real project: a surface-to-surface missile, the Redstone. Some of the Germans see it as merely another redesign of the V-2, and a NASA history calls the Redstone the “Americanized” V-2. But it becomes a reliable rocket. In 1952 von Braun becomes chief of the arsenal’s Guided Missile Development Division. The first Redstone lifts off from Cape Canaveral on August 20, 1953. Thirty-six more test flights follow before it is declared operational in 1958.

“When the Redstone came upon us, we were prepared,” Stuhlinger would say.

The Arsenal System

Von Braun applies there a method that came to be called the “arsenal system.” The government engineers do not merely design and supervise companies: they design, build and test themselves. They built the first seventeen Redstones themselves before training Chrysler personnel and turning the work over to the company. The Korean War has cut funding, and work done in-house costs less. Karl Heimburg, the head of testing, received a bid of seventy-five thousand dollars for a test stand. His men built a “poor man’s” stand for a thousand dollars in materials.

With the Redstone come young Americans too. Many are Korean War draftees with engineering degrees, whom the army assigns to Huntsville. One of them, Henry Pohl, described his first test firing: “This huge massive building that we were in—you could feel a quiver from the power of that thing. I was hooked. I would have given my $75 a month to work there!” After serving their apprenticeship under the Germans, they would later become the center’s leaders.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (Huntsville before the space age, the 1941 arsenals, H. Toftoy’s choice of Redstone, J. Sparkman, arrival of the Germans, testimony of E. Stuhlinger and H. Heller, local life, astronomical society, naturalization of April 15, 1955, Redstone, arsenal system, K. Heimburg’s test stand, drafted engineers, H. Pohl’s testimony) and ch. II (first seventeen Redstones); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (first launch of August 20, 1953, 36 tests, operational in 1958); D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 2 (“Americanized” V-2). Dunar and Waring date the arrival of the first Germans to March or April 1950.

Chapter 16 · 1952 – 1957 Mister Space

On March 22, 1952, a magazine with a circulation of three million shows its readers winged rockets and a wheel-shaped space station spinning above the Earth. The magazine is Collier’s. The title of the series promises: “Man Will Conquer Space Soon!” The principal author is a thirty-nine-year-old German engineer who, seven years earlier, was building rockets for Hitler.

The Book Hardly Anyone Had Read

The slim book of calculations about Mars had not been widely distributed. But it won over the editors of Collier’s, one of the most popular illustrated weeklies in the country. They commission von Braun to write a series of articles on space exploration. The editor in charge of the project, Cornelius Ryan, also solicits contributions from astronomer Fred Whipple, physicist Joseph Kaplan, physiologist Heinz Haber, United Nations lawyer Oscar Schachter, and science writer Willy Ley, a veteran of the Berlin rocket society. The artists Chesley Bonestell, Rolf Klep and Fred Freeman bring the descriptions to life.

Eight articles appear. They lay out a logical program: first the winged ferries and the orbiting station; then, in October 1952, the Moon; finally, in the issue of April 30, 1954, Mars. Each step builds the means and the experience for the next. Readers learn that a Moon landing could take place within the next quarter century.

Mars in Collier’s

The Collier’s Mars expedition repeats the book’s, with one difference: the flotilla is assembled near the space station, whose telescopes, above the atmosphere, will have helped select landing sites.

Von Braun remains cautious: man will go to Mars, he is sure of it, but it will be a century or more before he is ready.

And he takes up a subject that Mars plans usually ignore: the crew’s state of mind. “At the end of a few months,” he writes, “someone is likely to go berserk.” Little mannerisms, the way a man cracks his knuckles, blows his nose, grins, talks or gestures, end up creating tension and hatred that could lead to murder. And if someone cracks, you can’t call off the expedition: you’ll have to take him with you. He even proposes censoring radio messages, to spare the crew discouraging news from home.

The Mars of 1956

The articles become books. The last, The Exploration of Mars, written with Willy Ley, appears in 1956, the year Mars comes closest to the Earth. The portrait of the planet it gives is that of the time: a small planet three-quarters of which is cold desert, the rest covered with a sort of plant life that biology cannot account for. For von Braun, Portree notes, life on Mars was a given.

The plan, meanwhile, has slimmed down: only twelve men and two ships, assembled over seven months by four hundred launches, two a day. A single glider of 177 tons descends with nine men; three stay in orbit. The proposed site is a dark region visible in telescopes, Margaritifer Sinus, near two of the famous canals. They stay a year. The authors concede that nuclear propulsion might be tested “within a decade or so,” but they find it “exciting as well as instructive” to show that Mars can be reached with the technology of the day.

Walt Disney

Walt Disney has read Collier’s. He contacts von Braun. Three television programs result, from 1955 to 1957. The first, Man in Space, broadcast on March 9, 1955, is said to have drawn forty million viewers. The third, Mars and Beyond, airs on December 4, 1957. As history would have it, it shows the umbrella-shaped electric-propulsion Mars ships of his colleague Ernst Stuhlinger, not von Braun’s.

The Scientist in the White Coat

These years make him a national figure. Through Collier’s, Portree writes, the charismatic von Braun became identified with space flight in the minds of Americans: the quintessential white-coated rocket scientist. Later, one of his writers would call him “Mister Space.” The Marshall historians note his ability to communicate complex ideas in simple terms and his appeal as a speaker.

The past is not erased for all that. Neufeld notes that he defuses it: in his autobiographical articles, he presents himself as an apolitical scientist who only wanted to go into space. And the army, his employer, keeps the files secret.

Sources: D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 1 (Collier’s: C. Ryan, contributors, artists, circulation, eight articles, dates, 1954 Mars plan, epigraph, crew psychology, radio censorship, The Exploration of Mars, life on Mars, twelve-man plan, Margaritifer Sinus, nuclear propulsion, image of the scientist) and ch. 2 (Disney, Mars and Beyond of December 4, 1957, Stuhlinger’s ships); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I and II (Moon landing within a quarter century, speaking ability, “Mister Space” after A. Crisp); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019. The title of the 1952 series and the date and audience of Man in Space come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source).

Chapter 17 · 1953 – 1957 The Forbidden Satellite

On September 20, 1956, an army rocket, the Jupiter-C, lifts off from Cape Canaveral. At its top is a fourth stage. It is a dummy. The Defense Department has sent observers to make sure of one thing: that von Braun’s team does not activate that last stage and, by surprise, put an object into orbit around the Earth ahead of the navy.

Project Orbiter

Von Braun had long been thinking about a satellite. In 1953 he proposes launching one with existing hardware. The following year the army suggests a joint project with the navy: Project Orbiter. The air force and the Naval Research Laboratory each propose their own.

The Defense Department convenes a panel to choose. In August 1955 it selects the Naval Research Laboratory’s project, Vanguard. For Huntsville, it is the end of a hope. The Marshall historians report a suspicion that circulated at the time: some in the department may not have wanted the first American satellite to be launched by a German team.

The Missile Agency

The army reorganizes its missile work. In 1956 it creates at Redstone the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, ABMA. Its task is an intermediate-range missile, 1,500 miles: the Jupiter. Its commander, from February 1956, is General John Medaris. “He had an iron fist,” an engineer, Helmut Hoelzer, recalled, but he was “an excellent, outstanding man.” Medaris triples the workforce. Visitors notice the agency’s mood: optimistic, can-do.

With Medaris, von Braun forms a venturesome pair. The history of the Saturn rocket describes ABMA as a remarkably resourceful and aggressive organization.

The “Diplomatic Solution”

Medaris repeatedly requests authority to launch a satellite with the Jupiter. He is turned down. “We at Huntsville knew that our rocket technology was fully capable of satellite application and could quickly be implemented,” von Braun later reflected.

So the team finds a way around. An ABMA insider called it von Braun’s “diplomatic solution.” There is a real problem to study: the reentry of warheads into the atmosphere, where they heat up until they burn. The Jupiter-C is therefore used to test nose cones. Its solid-fuel second and third stages accelerate an inert fourth stage attached to an experimental nose cone. “Ablation” is tested: a coating that melts and peels away, carrying off the heat. The technique will prevail.

A future director of the Marshall Center, William Lucas, put it more bluntly: “We went ahead and developed a launch vehicle anyway and justified it on the basis of testing nose cones.”

After the tests of summer 1957, von Braun declares that a live fourth stage and a different trajectory would have given the United States its satellite.

Still no authorization comes.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (1953 proposal, Orbiter, choice of Vanguard in August 1955, suspicion, ABMA, J. Medaris, H. Hoelzer’s testimony, the agency’s mood, refusals, von Braun’s quotation, observers of September 20, 1956, ablation, altitude above 600 miles, W. Lucas’s quotation); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (creation of ABMA in 1956, the Medaris-von Braun pair, “diplomatic solution,” inert fourth stage, statement after the summer 1957 tests).

Chapter 18 · 1957 – 1958 Eighty-Four Days

On October 4, 1957, Neil McElroy, the incoming secretary of defense, is visiting Redstone Arsenal when the news breaks: the Soviet Union has just put the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit. That evening at dinner, von Braun sits on one side of McElroy and General Medaris on the other. Von Braun insists that ABMA can launch a satellite within sixty days. Medaris, more cautious, says ninety might be more realistic.

It Takes a Second Sputnik

Three days later, the Secretary of the Army, Wilber Brucker, urges the secretary of defense to let ABMA launch a satellite with a Jupiter-C, promising a launch within four months. The green light comes only after a second shock. On November 3, the Soviets launch Sputnik II, carrying the dog Laika. Authorization is given on November 8. The launch date is set for January 29 or 30, 1958.

On December 6, before television cameras, the navy’s Vanguard rocket explodes and collapses on its launch pad. From now on, America is counting on Huntsville.

Pickering’s Satellite

Eighty-four days of frantic work follow, in Huntsville and at Cape Canaveral. President Eisenhower, who does not want to be pushed into a race with the Russians, insists that the satellite make a scientific contribution to the International Geophysical Year. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, under William Pickering, builds the satellite: Explorer I, a cylinder 34 inches long and 6 inches in diameter, weighing just over 18 pounds. James Van Allen of the University of Iowa supplies an instrument to measure cosmic radiation. ABMA prepares the rocket, renamed Juno I: a Jupiter-C topped by small solid-fuel rockets.

The satellite is ready on time. The weather imposes a two-day delay.

January 31, 1958

On January 31, 1958, Explorer I goes into orbit. Its highest point is 1,594 miles above the Earth. Van Allen’s instrument will make possible a discovery: the Earth is surrounded by belts of charged particles, known ever since as the Van Allen belts.

The history of the Saturn rocket notes that ABMA missed its target date by only one day. Thomas Paine, who would later lead NASA, would recall the circumstances: the Huntsville team had been ready to launch a small satellite since 1956, but its proposal had been shelved in favor of the navy’s.

In early 1958, von Braun stands in the spotlight. He testifies before Congress, lobbying for more space exploration and for a trip to the Moon. The United States has found its space engineer. He was born in Prussia, and in the army’s secret files he still holds an SS rank.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (dinner of October 4, 1957, with N. McElroy, 60 and 90 days, W. Brucker’s request, Sputnik II, January 29 date, Vanguard on December 6, 84 days, Eisenhower’s requirement, W. Pickering, J. Van Allen, Explorer I’s dimensions and weight, Juno I, weather delay, date and apogee of 1,594 miles) and ch. II (congressional testimony); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 1 (authorization of November 8, target date of January 30, launch one day late); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (television, team ready since 1956, Van Allen belts); D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 2 (discovery of the belts). Explorer I’s weight varies by source: just over 18 pounds according to Dunar and Waring, 10.5 pounds according to Paine, 31 pounds according to Portree (with its last stage).

Chapter 19 · 1957 – 1960 An Infant Saturn

The first Saturn looks nothing like a spaceship of the future. To work fast and cheaply, the Huntsville team rummaged through its own stockrooms. It found Redstone and Jupiter tanks there, rejects and unfinished parts. It bundled them together: eight Redstone tanks 1.78 meters in diameter, arranged around a Jupiter tank of 2.67 meters. Underneath, eight engines. “The dire need made us more inventive,” one of the managers, Willy Mrazek, would say. Von Braun summed up the machine in one phrase: “Juno V was, in fact, an infant Saturn.”

Seven Hundred Tons of Thrust

In December 1957, ABMA submits to the Defense Department a national program for missiles and space vehicles. It rests on one idea: cluster several existing engines under a single first stage, to reach quickly a thrust of one and a half million pounds, nearly seven hundred metric tons.

On February 7, 1958, the department creates an agency for advanced research, ARPA. On August 15, 1958, its Order Number 14-59 launches the project: develop a booster of approximately 1,500,000 pounds of thrust “based on a cluster of available rocket engines.” The static firing is to take place before the end of 1959. The engine contract, for the H-1, is signed with Rocketdyne on September 11; ABMA commits half its funds to it. In the following months, ARPA extends the order to flight tests.

Mars by 1977

That same year, von Braun chairs a working group on launch vehicles within a committee of the NACA, the federal aeronautics research body. Its report, dated July 18, 1958, opens with harsh criticism of the duplication of American efforts and finds the Soviet Union ahead.

Then it proposes a timetable. A four-man space station in orbit in 1961. A man on the Moon in 1965 or 1966. A fifty-man station in 1967. A permanent Moon base in 1973 or 1974. And “manned interplanetary trips” in 1977. The whole for seventeen billion dollars and 1,823 launches.

NASA

On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signs the act creating NASA, a civilian agency. It opens its doors on October 1. Its administrator, T. Keith Glennan, wants von Braun’s team.

Von Braun refuses. He fears his team will be broken up. He owes loyalty to Medaris. He worries that NASA will no longer let his engineers do the work themselves. With some of his lieutenants, he speaks of lucrative offers from industry and threatens to leave government service if the team is divided. In December 1958, a compromise leaves it with the army.

But the army is not allowed to use so powerful a rocket. In April 1959, Herbert York, at the Defense Department, orders Saturn canceled: he sees “no military justification” for it. Medaris would describe the dilemma in his memoirs: staying in the army meant guaranteeing that the team’s space capabilities would “die on the vine”; leaving meant hoping that “a fond and wealthy foster parent could be found.” For Medaris and von Braun, NASA is the lesser evil.

On October 21, 1959, Eisenhower approves the transfer. On July 1, 1960, 4,670 people move from the army to NASA. The employees receive a new paycheck with a green stripe down the middle. That, one of them recalled, was the only difference. The center will bear the name of General George Marshall, the man of the Marshall Plan and of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Eight Engines

On September 8, 1960, Eisenhower comes to dedicate the center. On the way to the ceremony, he stops before a test stand holding an enormous Saturn first stage. He turns to von Braun and says he has never seen anything like it. “They come into my office and say it has eight engines. I didn’t know if they put one on top of the other or what.”

Twenty thousand people attend the dedication. Wernher von Braun, forty-eight, is the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

The year of waiting had a price. While the team stayed with the army, a small group of engineers from the Langley center had settled at the heart of NASA’s human spaceflight plans. It would become the Houston center. One account of the Apollo program would say that von Braun’s people “had missed their chance to run the whole mission” by staying with the army for that extra year.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 2 (proposal of December 1957, ARPA, Order 14-59 of August 15, 1958, Rocketdyne contract of September 11, tanks, quotations from W. Mrazek and von Braun, extension to flights, von Braun’s working group and its report of July 18, 1958); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (act of July 29, 1958, von Braun’s refusal and his reasons, compromise of December 1958, H. York, Medaris’s memoirs, decision of October 21, 1959, transfer of July 1, 1960, green-striped paycheck according to J. Kingsbury, the center’s name, dedication of September 8, 1960, and Eisenhower’s remarks, the Langley group and the account quoted). The conversion of 1.5 million pounds into metric tons is approximate.

Chapter 20 · 1960 – 1970 Dirty Hands

One day, according to a story told at the Marshall Center, NASA Headquarters asks von Braun for a reliability figure for a stage of the Saturn rocket. He answers: 0.99999. Where does the figure come from? He has called five of his laboratory directors and asked them whether the stage would cause trouble. The first answered: “Nein.” The second: “Nein.” The third, the fourth, the fifth: “Nein.”

A Space Agency in Miniature

The anecdote reflects a distrust: that of the Huntsville engineers toward statistics. For them, a rocket is not a mass-produced item whose defective copies are simply replaced. As one of them put it, you cannot put a man on a launch vehicle and say, “if it fails, and if you get killed, take the next one.” Quality has to be built in from the first day. Von Braun said it his own way: it was “better to build a rocket in the factory than on the launch pad.”

The Marshall Center looks more like a factory than a campus. Its eight laboratories can design, test and build almost any kind of space hardware. NASA’s historians describe it as “almost a space agency in miniature.” Everything is tested, to failure, at full scale. Testing accounts for half the cost of the Saturn program.

With industry, Marshall practices what it calls “penetration.” Center engineers live in the suppliers’ plants and watch everything, engineer to engineer. On the Centaur rocket, the air force had eight officials; Marshall assigns a hundred and forty. During a visit by NASA Administrator James Webb, the engineers show him a rag they found in a rocket engine, to explain why they distrust contractors.

The Boss

Von Braun, his associates say, wants managers with “dirty hands.” Doing the work oneself, at the bench, keeps leaders’ knowledge up to date and their judgment sharp. He is the model.

Those who knew him speak of his charisma. Konrad Dannenberg said everyone felt like “the second most important man” in the world, working for the most important one. Ruth von Saurma, of his public affairs staff: “There was hardly anyone who did not like him and look up to him, although he never looked down on anyone.” Georg von Tiesenhausen: “Wernher von Braun was not a dictator—he didn’t have to be.” Stuhlinger: he “never said any disparaging word” about anyone.

The veterans tell a story. A young engineer made a forbidden last-minute adjustment to a Redstone, and the rocket flew out of control. He comes to admit it. Von Braun, happy to learn the source of the failure at last and wanting to reward honesty, brings him a bottle of champagne.

Monday Notes

Two habits become traditions at the center. Every week he meets with his “board”: laboratory directors, project managers, invited specialists. Discussion is free and often heated. His associates marvel at his ability to summarize a confused presentation in a few sentences, to translate jargon, to merge conflicting opinions into a decision everyone accepts. Experts “would be talking almost like in unknown tongues,” one recalled, “and finally von Braun would take over and explain what was being said in terms that everybody could understand.”

The other habit is the “weekly notes.” Each manager sends him a single page summarizing his week and his problems. Von Braun scribbles comments in the margins and circulates copies to all the top officials. They are called the “Monday Notes.” To write them, managers ask their subordinates for “Friday Notes.”

His deputy of long standing, Eberhard Rees, is his counterweight. Von Braun is the visionary, Rees the practical manager. “Von Braun always floated with his feet above the ground,” von Tiesenhausen said; Rees would tell him: “Now simmer down.”

The Other Side

Not everyone remembers it the same way. An engineer lower in the hierarchy found that the notes brought up mostly problems, and that nobody at the bottom felt free to do anything without approval from the next level up. One assessment would speak of “an almost iron-like discipline” of communication. The center had a reputation for secrecy. “It was as if you did something wrong,” a young engineer recalled, “you would be banished.”

Mister Space

He is also NASA’s master publicist. He turns out nearly a hundred and fifty articles and speeches a year. Two writers work for him full time. From 1963 to 1973 he writes a monthly column for Popular Science. He writes there about anticommunism and Christianity too, but mostly about space. His motto is a little rhyme: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise!”

The writer Norman Mailer described him as the only NASA manager known to the public, “the real engineer, the spiritual leader, the inventor, the force, the philosopher, the genius” of America’s space program.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. II (anecdote of the five “Nein,” distrust of statistics, D. Grau’s remark, von Braun’s phrase about the factory and the launch pad, appearance and laboratories of the center, testing, penetration, Centaur, rag, “dirty hands,” testimony of K. Dannenberg, R. von Saurma, G. von Tiesenhausen and E. Stuhlinger, bottle of champagne, board and weekly notes, E. Rees, publicity, Popular Science, motto, N. Mailer) and ch. V (criticism of the notes, “almost iron-like” discipline, secrecy).

Chapter 21 · 1961 – 1962 “The Position of the Center”

On June 7, 1962, at the Marshall Center, a long meeting draws to a close. All day, von Braun’s engineers have presented their preferred method of going to the Moon: assembling the spacecraft in orbit around the Earth from two rockets. It is the idea he himself had championed since the Collier’s articles. Then von Braun takes the floor. “Gentlemen,” he says, “it’s been a very interesting day and I think the work we’ve done has been extremely good, but now I would like to tell you the position of the Center.” The position of the Center is the opposite of the one his men have just defended.

Gagarin, Shepard, Kennedy

Everything had accelerated the year before. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth. The Americans have not yet sent anyone into space.

Their first man is to fly on a von Braun rocket, an adapted Redstone. A test flight in January 1961 went higher than planned. The problems, according to other engineers, are simple and already resolved. Von Braun nevertheless insists on one more uncrewed test, in March. That flight takes the slot that might have put Alan Shepard into space three weeks ahead of Gagarin. His caution, it would be said, cost the United States first place. Shepard flies on May 5, 1961.

On May 25, President Kennedy asks Congress to commit the nation to “landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to the Earth” before the decade is out. The rocket will be von Braun’s: the Saturn V, whose first stage will have five F-1 engines of one and a half million pounds of thrust each.

Three Ways to the Moon

It remains to choose how. Three solutions compete. The first, “direct ascent,” would launch in one go a large spacecraft that would land on the Moon and take off again; it would require a giant rocket, the Nova, twice as powerful as the Saturn V. Von Braun rules it out: going ahead with Nova, he says, meant “giving up the race to put a man on the Moon in this decade even before we started.”

The second, his own, is Earth orbit rendezvous: two Saturn Vs separately lift pieces of the spacecraft, or the spacecraft and its fuel, which are joined around the Earth. It prepares for the future: stations, refueling in orbit, bases.

The third comes from an engineer at the Langley center, John Houbolt: lunar orbit rendezvous. A main spacecraft and a small landing craft travel together. Once in orbit around the Moon, the lander descends, lifts off, rejoins the spacecraft, and is then discarded. A single rocket is enough. Houston comes around to it as early as January 1962.

Why He Changed

Why does von Braun switch? The witnesses disagree. Stuhlinger believed he preferred his own solution but feared that infighting between centers would make them miss Kennedy’s deadline; he would have turned conciliator. Two Headquarters officials, Joseph Shea and Brainerd Holmes, recounted that in May he kept asking them what Marshall would gain if NASA chose the lunar rendezvous. They then offered Marshall a piece of the action on the lunar surface. Holmes denied that any formal bargain was struck.

On June 7 he gives his reasons. He admits he was “a bit skeptical” at first. But lunar rendezvous requires one successful launch instead of two. It provides the cleanest division of work between centers and contractors. And time is pressing: unless a decision is made “very soon,” the chances of accomplishing the first lunar expedition in the decade “will fade away rapidly.” Houbolt’s solution offers, he concludes, “the highest confidence factor of successful accomplishment within this decade.”

For some of his men, it is a shock. When he had announced his decision to his board, Stuhlinger recalled, it caused a “storm.” But Shea would say that the endorsement was “a major element in the consolidation of NASA.” Marshall gains a study of lunar vehicles, from which the lunar rover would emerge.

“Where Is Jerry?”

In September 1962, Kennedy visits Marshall. Standing before a chart, von Braun explains the lunar rendezvous maneuver. The president interrupts: “I understand Dr. Wiesner doesn’t agree with this.” He turns to the crowd of newsmen and guests: “Where is Jerry?” Jerome Wiesner, his science adviser, steps forward and sets out his objections. A lively exchange follows, just out of earshot of the straining reporters. On November 7, NASA confirms its choice.

“The Road to the Planets Is Open”

That year, for a new edition of his book on Mars, von Braun writes a new preface. He recalls his 1952 sentence about the “minor military operation,” and retracts it. With the technology of 1962, he writes, a large expedition to Mars will be possible “in fifteen or twenty years,” at a cost that will be only a minute fraction of the yearly national defense budget. Liquid hydrogen and oxygen engines, the coming nuclear propulsion, and direct atmospheric reentry have changed everything. Unknowns remain, such as radiation from the Sun: the ships may need shielded “storm cellars.” But no probe has found any fundamental barrier.

He concludes: “Fourteen years ago we thought it was, but now we know it: the road to the planets is open.”

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. II (Kennedy’s speech, Saturn V and F-1 engines, three modes, Nova and von Braun’s remark, Marshall’s preference, J. Houbolt, Houston’s change of position, interpretations by E. Stuhlinger, J. Shea and B. Holmes, meeting of June 7, 1962, and quotations, “storm,” Shea’s judgment, lunar vehicle); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 2 and 3 (Gagarin, Kennedy’s visit in September 1962 according to R. Seamans, confirmation of November 7); W. von Braun, The Mars Project, 1962 preface; NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (Shepard’s flight). The extra test flight of March 1961 and the judgment on von Braun’s caution come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source).

Chapter 22 · 1963 – 1965 A Wall Around the Ballot Box

On June 8, 1965, the governor of Alabama, George Wallace, comes to the Marshall Center with members of the state legislature and forty-eight out-of-state newsmen. They are to be shown a Saturn test firing. Wallace is the man who promised “segregation forever.” Two years earlier, he stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama to bar the admission of Black students. That day, in front of him, von Braun urges Alabama to “shed the shackles of the past.”

Huntsville Is in Alabama

Alabama in the early 1960s is at the heart of the civil rights struggle. Birmingham, Selma, Montgomery. Huntsville is calmer: its prosperity depends on the federal government, and its leaders want to avoid trouble. But, as one of NASA Administrator James Webb’s assistants observed, “Huntsville is in Alabama.” Schools and public facilities are segregated. African Americans make up eighteen percent of the city’s population and less than one percent of the center’s workforce.

In May 1962, two Black Marshall employees file discrimination complaints. In August 1963, the hearing officer’s report finds in their favor. It notes that of the center’s 7,335 employees, only 52 are Black, and concludes that “a pattern of discrimination has and continues to exist at Marshall.” Von Braun accepts the finding but calls some of the charges “gratuitous and unwarranted under the circumstances.” The figures may be accurate, he writes, but they fail to reflect the center’s efforts, or how few qualified candidates there are in the area.

Washington Pushes

In the spring of 1963, the violence in Birmingham jolts the Kennedy administration into action. Webb directs von Braun to give personal attention to equal employment opportunity. Marshall sets up an affirmative action program and hires a Black recruiter, Charlie Smoot. On June 13, 1963, two days after Wallace blocked the university, a Marshall mathematician, David McGlathery, becomes without incident the first Black student at the university’s Huntsville center.

An Unexpected Speaker

From late 1964, von Braun speaks out. On December 8, before the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce, he declares: “I think we should all admit this fact: Alabama’s image is marred by civil rights incidents and statements.” He asks the businessmen to do more “for those less fortunate families who are bypassed by the big space and missile boom.”

In the months that follow, he returns to the subject. Alabama ranks “near the bottom” in education. Barriers to voting form “a Berlin Wall around the ballot box.” “Obstructionism and defiance … can hurt and are hurting Alabama.” The national press calls him “one of the most outspoken and persistent spokesmen for moderation and racial reconciliation in the South.” Neither he nor Webb mentions Wallace by name. Both criticize his policies.

On June 8, 1965, in a more informal setting, Webb and von Braun ask the governor whether he would like to be the first person on the Moon. Wallace replies: “Well, you fellows might not bring me back.”

The Record

NASA’s historians do not stop at the speeches. The efforts of 1963–1965, they write, came from pressure from Washington, and the program did not alter the center’s employment pattern. By late 1969, Marshall has only eight Black employees above a certain grade; Houston has twenty-one. A decade later, an internal report would reserve its harshest criticism for Marshall.

The former SS officer had become, in the segregated South, a voice for integration. Both statements are true.

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. IV (“The Marshall Reconstruction”: context, remark about Huntsville, proportions, complaints of 1962, report of August 1963 and von Braun’s answer, J. Webb’s instructions, affirmative action, C. Smoot, D. McGlathery, speech of December 8, 1964, and later statements, press judgment, visit of June 8, 1965, and Wallace’s reply, record). The phrase “segregation forever” and the blocking of the university (June 1963) are also cited by Dunar and Waring.

Chapter 23 · 1963 – 1967 All-Up

On November 1, 1963, a teletype arrives at NASA’s centers. It is signed by George Mueller, the new head of human spaceflight. It orders that the Saturn V fly, from its very first launch, with all its stages live. And that the third flight, not the seventh, carry a crew. In Huntsville, the reaction is “shock and incredulity.” One laboratory director thinks Mueller has lost his mind.

Stage by Stage

Until then, Marshall had always tested its rockets step by step. The first Saturn, on October 27, 1961, flew with only one live stage, the others filled with ballast. It was the Peenemünde method: caution, building blocks, generous safety margins. The ten Saturn Is were launched this way without any major redesign being needed. On one of them, an engine was even shut down on purpose in flight, to show that the other seven could finish the job.

Mueller wants something else. A systems engineer, he had applied to the air force’s Titan II missile what he calls “all-up” testing: the complete rocket is launched the first time. Stage-by-stage tests, he says, are expensive and waste time without adding any assurance.

All of Marshall’s laboratory directors and project managers oppose it at first. They call it an “impossible” and “dangerous idea.” They worry most about the liquid-hydrogen upper stages. Lee James recalled: “Everybody explained [to Mueller] how complicated, how big this was, how the valves had never been used, how the engines had never been used.”

Von Braun himself thinks the idea “sounded reckless.” Rees would later say he “personally fought” it. Then von Braun listens to the arguments. His engineers find no decisive technical reason to oppose it. Reconfiguring the launch facilities after each stage would make them miss the end-of-the-decade deadline. He tells his people that all-up is the way to go.

Lee James added: “I don’t think anybody at Marshall believed it would work.”

The Biggest Rocket

The Saturn V takes shape. It stands 111 meters tall. It weighs about 2,830 metric tons at liftoff. Its first stage, ten meters in diameter, holds more than two thousand tons of kerosene and liquid oxygen, which its five F-1 engines gulp at 13.6 tons per second. The two upper stages burn liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, a technology whose progress von Braun had hailed in his 1962 preface.

In November 1965 he looks for an image to convey this power. “One Saturn V alone,” he writes, “will carry twice as much payload as the entire NASA space program up to this point in time. In fact, all the orbiters, all the deep space probes, and all the Mercurys and Geminis that have ever flown would only load the cargo compartment of one Saturn V to 50% of capacity.”

Antarctica

During the austral summer of 1966–1967, von Braun travels to Antarctica with other NASA leaders. The aim is to find out whether experience gained in that icy desert could serve the human exploration of space. He is interested in the management of scientific stations, in logistics, habitation and life support, and in the dry valleys where instruments that would one day look for life on Mars might be tested. Some fifteen years earlier, he had already modeled his Mars flotilla on the polar expeditions.

November 9, 1967

On January 27, 1967, three astronauts die in a fire in their Apollo cabin, on the ground. The program is shaken. Then, on November 9, at seven in the morning, the first Saturn V lifts off from Pad 39A in Florida with all its stages live. It is the uncrewed Apollo 4 mission. At the press site, three and a half miles away, the thunder threatens to collapse the reporters’ temporary studios. Everything works. The capsule comes back from space at lunar-return speed and splashes down in the Pacific ten kilometers from the planned spot.

Von Braun tells reporters that he regards “this happy day as one of the three or four highlights of my professional life—to be surpassed only by the manned lunar landing.”

Sources: A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. III (teletype of November 1, 1963, reactions at Marshall, W. Mrazek, quotations from L. James, positions of von Braun and E. Rees, reasons for the decision); R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 2 and 10 (first Saturn flight of October 27, 1961, ten Saturn Is, engine shut down on SA-4, Apollo 4); D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 5 (article of November 1965, Saturn V characteristics, Apollo 4 flight, quotation of November 9, 1967). The Antarctic trip comes from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source). The fire of January 27, 1967, belongs to general history; Bilstein and Portree mention it.

Chapter 24 · 1968 The Troublesome Bird

On April 4, 1968, the second Saturn V lifts off faultlessly. “For two minutes,” von Braun recalled, “everything looked like a repeat of the first Saturn V’s textbook performance. Then a feeling of apprehension rolled through the launch control center when, around the 125th second, telemetered signals from accelerometers indicated an apparently mild Pogo vibration.” The rocket begins to oscillate lengthwise, like a pogo stick. It is only the beginning.

Three Engines Out

The oscillation lasts less than ten seconds. The first stage separates normally. The second stage ignites. But after four and a half minutes, one of its five engines falters and shuts down. A second later, another engine stops as well. The onboard instrument unit corrects the trajectory and makes the three remaining engines burn longer. The rocket reaches an orbit, a lopsided one. Then the third stage, which was supposed to reignite to head for the Moon, refuses to restart.

“Had the flight been manned, the astronauts would have returned safely,” von Braun said, “but the flight clearly left a lot to be desired. With three engines out, we just cannot go to the Moon.”

The Mystery of the Bellows

Engineers from Marshall and from the engine maker Rocketdyne investigate. Temperature sensors reveal a liquid-hydrogen leak in the upper part of an engine. The line feeding the igniter has ruptured. On a test stand, the line is subjected to pressures, flow rates and vibrations far beyond those of a flight. It holds.

So it is tested in a vacuum chamber, as in space. Eight lines are installed. Within a hundred seconds, all eight break, each time in the same place: in the bellows, the accordion-like sections that give the line flexibility. On the ground, surrounding air, liquefied by the cold of the hydrogen, had been trapped between the bellows and their braid and damped the vibration. In a vacuum there was no air. The bellows are replaced with simple bends.

The investigation also finds why the second engine had shut down: a wiring error. The command to close the valve of the failing engine had gone to its neighbor.

As for the oscillation, it comes from a coincidence: the first-stage engines vibrate naturally at about 5.5 hertz, and the whole vehicle at around 5.25 hertz. When the two frequencies meet, the structure resonates. Helium is injected into cavities in the oxygen lines, which act as shock absorbers. In August 1968, both fixes are demonstrated on the test stand.

Around the Moon

Meanwhile, the schedule is slipping. The lunar module is not ready. In August 1968, a Houston engineer, George Low, proposes an idea that is called daring: send the third Saturn V, with a crew, around the Moon without a lunar module. A hastily convened meeting is held at Marshall. The idea looks feasible. In the fall, von Braun speaks publicly of “a remote possibility of a spectacular swing around the Moon.”

Before the launch, a long meeting with all the contractors seems to conclude that the rocket is ready. One man is uneasy: Dieter Grau, Marshall’s head of quality, who has lived with this rocket for months. Von Braun senses his reticence and asks what more should be done. Grau wants one more complete check. Von Braun grants it. Grau’s people go over the rocket from top to bottom. They find numerous little mistakes and potential problems. “I think that was kind of a life saver,” Grau would say.

Christmas 1968

On December 21, 1968, at 7:51 a.m., Apollo 8 leaves Florida with Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders. The Saturn V performs without a hitch: no more oscillation, engines that restart. For the first time, men leave the Earth’s gravitational pull behind. On Christmas Eve, they circle the Moon and read the first verses of Genesis to the Earth.

That same year, once again, his past came looking for him.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 12 (flight AS-502 of April 4, 1968, von Braun’s account and quotations, investigation of the J-2 engine and the bellows, wiring error, oscillations, helium shock absorbers, demonstrations of August 1968, G. Low’s idea, meeting at Marshall, von Braun’s remark in the fall, D. Grau and his quotation, Apollo 8 launch). The phenomenon is known as the pogo effect.

Chapter 25 · 1960 – 1969 The Witness in New Orleans

Six weeks before the flight of Apollo 8, the director of the Marshall Center receives a request he would gladly have done without. A West German court is trying three former SS men from the Mittelbau-Dora camp, the camp that supplied the prisoners for the V-2 factory. It wants to hear him as a witness. Von Braun fears the publicity, for himself and for NASA. He tries to beg off. In the end he testifies, on February 7, 1969, before the judge and the court at the West German consulate in New Orleans.

What He Told the Judge

Before the court, according to Michael Neufeld, he denies any personal responsibility. He puts as much distance as he can between his Peenemünde test center and the Mittelwerk complex. He acknowledges having seen terrible conditions underground. He does not admit to having seen dead bodies. It is on this occasion that he states he went to the Nordhausen area some fifteen times. After the hearing, he answers questions from the press.

A Past Kept at a Distance

He had received few such inquiries. His long-time press officer, Ed Buckbee, confirmed it. The army, which employed him from 1945 to 1960, had neutralized most of the uncomfortable questions, classifying his SS rank and the records of his associates. In his articles and interviews he holds the same line: an apolitical scientist who wanted to go into space; a merely nominal party member, under pressure from the regime; and, when he mentions the camps, he does so obliquely, assigning all blame to the SS.

Accusations did surface now and then. In the mid-1960s, an East German publication accused him of militaristic and bloodthirsty activities, in Germany and in the United States; it received some attention in America. It was at that time that former prisoners of Dora and Ellrich challenged him, and that he gave the detailed answer reported earlier.

What Washington Thought

In Washington, the past weighs on him without being spoken of. The Marshall historians speak of an “unspoken presence” in discussions with Headquarters. It compels von Braun and his associates to maintain a “proper” humility.

Thomas Paine, who would later lead NASA, recounted that James Webb wanted to keep von Braun out of Washington. Webb, he thought, felt that it could be managed as long as von Braun remained a technician down in Huntsville building a rocket, but not if he came to the capital. A White House staff member, Charles Sheldon, recalled that people discounted rumors that von Braun might someday head NASA: he would never be given a political position, it was said, since no one who had worked for Hitler could be trusted.

Webb can be patronizing with him. He warns him against overly optimistic projections in his speeches. He eventually limits his paid public appearances to four a year and requires him to submit his list of speaking engagements to Headquarters. Each time, von Braun apologetically accepts.

The Marshall historians see in this one of the reasons for a trait of his leadership: he defends his center, but only up to a point. He backs down rather than risk division. William Lucas, a future director of the center, compared NASA’s two great centers: when Headquarters gave an order, Houston ignored it; Marshall “would argue until they were blue in the face, but then they would go ahead and do it.”

After His Death

The full truth would come out only after his death. It is told at the end of this book.

Sources: M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (the court’s request, the trial of three SS men, testimony of February 7, 1969, in New Orleans, what he denied and admitted, interview, E. Buckbee’s testimony, the army’s attitude, line of defense); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (some fifteen visits, 1969 testimony); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I and V (answer to former prisoners, East German publication, “unspoken presence,” T. Paine’s remarks about J. Webb, C. Sheldon’s recollection, warnings and limit on speeches, conciliatory attitude, W. Lucas’s comparison).

Chapter 26 · 1969 A Magnificent Ride

On July 16, 1969, at 9:32 a.m., Saturn V number 506 leaves Pad 39A with Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin Aldrin. The crowd around the site is estimated at a million people, including two hundred members of Congress, sixty ambassadors and nineteen governors. Vice President Spiro Agnew is there, with former President Johnson. A photograph taken in the control room shows four NASA leaders celebrating Apollo 11’s arrival in orbit. One of them is Wernher von Braun.

The Biggest Unknown

For Michael Collins, the rocket was the most worrying unknown of the program. He explained why: a problem with the command module or the lunar module could have been fixed in a matter of months; if one of the huge Saturn Vs had blown up, it would have taken years. “The Saturn V,” he said, “loomed in our minds as being the biggest single unknown factor in the whole lunar landing program.”

That morning, from the van taking him to the pad, he had looked at it once more. The night before, under the searchlights, it had sparkled “like a delicate opal and silver necklace.” Now it was a machine again, “solid and businesslike, and big”: taller than a football field set on end, “truly a monster.”

The flight goes without a flaw. As the third stage sends them toward the Moon, Armstrong emits a heartfelt “whew.” When the engine shuts down, he calls Houston: “Hey, Houston, Apollo 11. That Saturn gave us a magnificent ride.”

Four days later, on July 20, Armstrong and Aldrin land the lunar module on the Sea of Tranquility.

A Boyhood Dream

Thomas Paine described what that day meant to von Braun. He saw the arrival of humans on the Moon as a step in the evolution of life. He compared it to the moment when the first marine creatures learned to live on land. It was, Paine writes, a boyhood dream come true.

Six months earlier, in a memo dated January 16, 1969, von Braun had confirmed to his staff that he would stay on in Huntsville. He had prayed a lot, he said, before and during the crucial Apollo flights.

And Next?

At the time of the landing, he publicly expresses his hope: that the Saturn V will continue to be developed, and that men will leave for Mars in the 1980s.

On the day of Apollo 11’s launch, Vice President Agnew had in fact spoken of his “individual feeling”: the United States should set “the simple, ambitious, optimistic goal of a manned flight to Mars by the end of the century.”

Von Braun is already working on that goal. He has a few weeks to present it to the White House.

Sources: R. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, ch. 12 (time of launch, crowd and dignitaries, M. Collins’s account and quotations, Armstrong’s “whew” and his words, landing, control room photograph); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (what Apollo meant to von Braun); D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 5 (S. Agnew’s statement). The memo of January 16, 1969, the prayers and the hope expressed at the time of the landing come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source).

Chapter 27 · August 4, 1969 November 12, 1981

On August 4, 1969, two weeks after the first steps on the Moon, Wernher von Braun addresses the group President Nixon has charged with charting America’s future in space. He has thirty minutes. He announces a date: November 12, 1981. On that day, he says, two American ships will leave Earth orbit carrying twelve men to Mars.

NASA’s Big Gun

The group is called the Space Task Group. It is chaired by Vice President Agnew. Around the table are Nixon’s science adviser, the Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a senior State Department official, and, most influential, the budget director, Robert Mayo.

Thomas Paine, now NASA Administrator, wants a great program. He has asked von Braun to build a Mars mission onto the overall plan prepared by George Mueller, which already called for a reusable space shuttle, orbiting stations, a lunar base and a “nuclear shuttle.” Paine sees him as “NASA’s big gun”: a space salesman whose talent had already shaped two decades of American spaceflight. Von Braun would say it was “an effort of a very few weeks to put a very consistent and good and plausible story together.”

The presentation lasts fifty-five minutes. Paine speaks for twenty minutes about the mystery and riches of the solar system. Then von Braun lays out his expedition. For the historian David Portree, those thirty minutes formed the heart and soul of NASA’s pitch. In retrospect, they also marked “the apogee of von Braun’s career.”

The Plan

He draws on the designs accumulated by his center’s Future Projects Office. All the hardware but one item would first serve around the Earth and the Moon. The only piece made solely for Mars would be the landing module. Deciding to build it, in 1974, would amount to a de facto commitment to Mars.

The schedule runs as follows. In 1975, the first space station module and the first shuttle fly. In 1978, the Mars lander is tested. In 1981, the expedition departs.

Each Mars ship is made of three “nuclear shuttles,” stages driven by a NERVA nuclear engine, set side by side, and a habitable mission module. The whole measures thirty meters across and eighty-two meters long, and weighs eight hundred tons, three quarters of it hydrogen. The pieces are lifted by upgraded Saturn Vs. The crews, two times six men, arrive by shuttle.

On November 12, 1981, the two outer nuclear shuttles fire, send each ship toward Mars, then detach, turn around and return to the station to be reused.

The outbound voyage lasts nine months. It will be “by no means an idle phase,” von Braun promises: each ship will be a laboratory, free of the disturbing influences of the Earth. With two observation points, the Earth and the spacecraft, new experiments become possible. Unknown comets may be discovered.

The First Step on Mars

The ships arrive on August 9, 1982, and enter orbit. For two days, the crews select the sites where twelve automated probes will land. These will set down, collect samples untouched by human hands, and bring them up to sterilized laboratories on board. If the samples show no hazard, three men will descend in a lander of forty-seven and a half tons. The second lander will be held in reserve: one man alone, von Braun explains, could fly it down to bring back a stranded crew.

“Man’s first step on Mars,” he says, “will be no less exciting than Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon.”

The explorers will stay from thirty to sixty days. They will study the geology of a planet that probably followed, in its origin, the same path as the Earth. They will search for life: preliminary data, he says, indicate that some lower forms of life can survive in the Martian environment. They will observe how living things brought from Earth behave there. And they will drill for water. Its discovery would open many possibilities: it might become possible to produce rocket fuel for the return trip on later missions.

Home by Way of Venus

The men come back up with four hundred kilograms of samples and equipment. On October 28, 1982, after eighty days near Mars, the ships depart. On February 28, 1983, they swing past Venus, whose gravity slows their return; along the way they map its cloud-hidden surface by radar and drop four probes. On August 14, 1983, they are back in orbit around the Earth.

The astronauts do not go straight home. Until the risk of bringing Martian germs back to Earth is better understood, they will be quarantined aboard the space station, where doctors will examine them. Then a shuttle will bring them down.

Further expeditions would follow in 1983–1984, 1986–1987 and 1988–1989. In 1989, for the twentieth anniversary of this presentation, a fifty-person base might be set up on Mars. NASA’s budget would peak at seven billion dollars a year in 1975, about 0.6 percent of gross national product, before falling back to five billion.

What Had Changed

This plan is no longer that of 1952. The gliders are gone: the Mariner 4 probe showed in 1965 that the Martian atmosphere is far too thin for them. The seventy men have become twelve. Automated probes, which he had not imagined at Fort Bliss, go first. And the nuclear engine, which he had doubted would be ready within twenty-five years, is at the heart of the project.

One thing has not changed: the flotilla. Two ships, so that one can save the other. Like Columbus’s three ships.

Sources: D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 5 (“Apogee”: membership of the Space Task Group, T. Paine’s request, G. Mueller’s plan, “big gun,” von Braun’s remark about the few weeks, length and division of the presentation, judgment on the apogee of his career, Future Projects Office designs, schedule, description of the ships, voyage dates, quotations on the cruise phase, sample-return probes, reserve lander, first step, scientific objectives, 900 pounds of samples, Venus swingby, quarantine, later expeditions, 1989 base, budget); the same work explains how Mariner 4 made the Martian gliders obsolete. Measurements are converted from feet and pounds.

Chapter 28 · 1969 – 1970 “Now Is Not the Time”

On August 5, 1969, the day after their White House presentation, Paine and von Braun present their Mars plan to the Senate Space Committee. That same day, the Mariner 7 probe flies past Mars and photographs a heavily cratered surface. The committee’s chairman, Clinton Anderson, had already answered, a week earlier, the question they are about to put to him: “Now is not the time to commit ourselves to the goal of a manned mission to Mars.”

The Country Has Other Worries

Anderson had backed NASA since its birth, and the nuclear rocket program all along. His refusal is therefore ominous. Other senators follow. Mark Hatfield says he is “not really ready, at this point,” to commit to a deadline to get a man to Mars. Margaret Chase Smith warns against long-range plans made in the emotional period after Apollo 11, which could lead to a crash program without the justification Apollo had.

Public opinion is no more favorable. A Gallup poll shows 53 percent of Americans opposed to a Mars mission and 39 percent in favor. The young favor it; those over thirty do not. The country is at war in Vietnam. Cities burned in 1968. Senator J. W. Fulbright points out that America went to the Moon above all to beat the Russians; going to Mars has nothing to do with the Russians.

And the news from Mars is bad. The images from Mariner 6 and 7 confirm those of Mariner 4: a cold, cratered, seemingly dead planet. The New York Times writes that these data make the possibility of life on Mars much less than it seemed even a week before, thus removing much of the original motivation for such a project.

“Another Man on a White Horse”

Von Braun has no illusions. Shortly after Apollo 11, he tells a space policy analyst, John Logsdon, that the legacy of Apollo has “spoiled the people at NASA.” “I believe that there may be too many people in NASA who at the moment are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet, like President Kennedy.”

The Space Task Group’s report, released on September 15, 1969, offers several paces, depending on the money available. White House staff add a cautious introduction: send men to Mars “before the end of this century,” but without making it an overriding priority. The budget director judges that NASA underestimates its costs.

On January 13, 1970, Paine announces the permanent closing of the Saturn V production line. On March 7, Nixon issues his space policy. It comes down to one vague sentence: “We will eventually send men to explore the planet Mars.” No date. The British weekly The Economist writes that the people at NASA looked like children who got the jigsaw puzzle they were expecting rather than the bicycle they were dreaming of.

Leaving Huntsville

In the meantime, on January 27, 1970, Paine has stunned Huntsville. He announces that von Braun will leave the Marshall Center on March 1 for NASA Headquarters in Washington. He will be in charge of planning. Paine wants him to help make Mars the agency’s next great goal. Von Braun himself doubts that another large program can be sold to Congress.

Why does he accept? Speculation abounds: frustration with the post-Apollo phasedown, the hope of a larger role in shaping the future, his rapport with Paine. Close associates believe his wife may have influenced the decision. He himself says: “I’ve spent ten years doing what was ‘urgent,’ and regrettably not doing what was ‘essential.’”

The announcement comes while he is on a seven-week vacation in the Caribbean. On February 2 he appears before the center’s executives wearing a beard grown on the trip. “I am leaving Marshall with nostalgia,” he tells them. “I have my heart in Marshall. I love this place.”

On February 24, 1970, Huntsville celebrates “Wernher von Braun Day.” Five thousand people turn out in cold, drizzly weather. A banner across the grandstand reads: “Dr. Wernher von Braun—Huntsville’s First Citizen—On Loan to Washington.” The city announces that its new civic center will bear his name. The local newspaper concludes: “Dr. von Braun leaves this community bigger and better than he found it.”

Sources: D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 5 (hearing of August 5, 1969, Mariner 6 and 7, C. Anderson’s statement of July 29, reactions of M. Hatfield and M. C. Smith, Gallup poll, J. W. Fulbright, New York Times, remarks to J. Logsdon, report of September 15, 1969, and its introduction, R. Mayo’s memorandum, end of the Saturn V line on January 13, 1970, Nixon’s statement of March 7, 1970, The Economist); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. V (announcement of January 27, 1970, intended role, von Braun’s reservations, possible reasons, quotation about the urgent and the essential, vacation, beard and statement of February 2, the day of February 24, 1970). The mention of cities burning in 1968 summarizes the unrest described by Portree.

Chapter 29 · 1970 – 1977 The Last Years

On April 20, 1970, a NASA photograph shows von Braun seated beside the astronaut Donald Slayton at a debriefing after the return of Apollo 13. The spacecraft had nearly failed to come back from the Moon. The caption gives von Braun’s new title: deputy associate administrator for planning. He is no longer the man who builds the rockets. He is the man who prepares plans.

The Planner

The titles vary by source. The Marshall historians speak of an associate administrator’s post, the fourth-ranking position in the agency; NASA today says it asked him to head up the agency’s strategic planning effort. Thomas Paine, who brought him there, wrote that he contributed to all the post-Apollo plans: a large orbiting station, continued lunar exploration, a long-range mission to Mars. None, Paine adds, was pursued. The Moon race had been won, and the nation’s attention had turned elsewhere.

Paine resigns in July 1970. The White House looks for a successor who will turn down what it calls NASA’s “empire-building fervor.” The lunar missions are cut back. Budgets fall.

On May 26, 1972, von Braun leaves NASA.

Fairchild

On July 1, 1972, he becomes vice president for engineering and development of an aerospace company, Fairchild Industries, in Germantown, Maryland. He goes on championing space. In 1975 he helps found an association to win the public over to the space cause, the National Space Institute, and becomes its first president.

In 1973, a routine medical examination reveals cancer. The medicine of the day cannot stop it. He keeps working for a while. His health forces him to leave Fairchild at the end of 1976.

In early 1977, President Ford awards him the nation’s highest scientific honor, the National Medal of Science, for 1975. He is too ill to attend the White House ceremony.

June 16, 1977

Wernher von Braun dies on June 16, 1977, in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington. He is sixty-five.

He is buried in Ivy Hill Cemetery in Alexandria. His gravestone bears a verse from Psalm 19: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.”

He did not live to see the space shuttle, a permanently crewed station, or a man on Mars. He did see, on the other hand, the first American craft land on Mars: the Viking 1 lander touched down on July 20, 1976, less than a year before his death. The Vikings did not provide proof of the life he had thought possible.

Sources: NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun” (photograph of April 20, 1970, and its caption, planning assignment, move to Fairchild, place and date of death); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. V (title and rank of the post); T. O. Paine, foreword to The Mars Project (contribution to the plans, abandonment); D. S. F. Portree, Humans to Mars, ch. 5 (Paine’s resignation, instructions for his successor); M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (death from cancer at 65). The date he left NASA, the position at Fairchild, the cancer found in 1973, the National Space Institute, the medal, the grave and the psalm come from the English-language Wikipedia article (tertiary source), which speaks of kidney cancer in 1973 and of pancreatic cancer at his death. The date of the Viking 1 landing and the results of those probes belong to general history; see also, on this site, the history of NASA.

Chapter 30 · After 1977 What Came Out of the Archives

In 1984, seven years after von Braun’s death, Arthur Rudolph leaves the United States. The man who had managed the Saturn V program for NASA goes back to Germany voluntarily rather than contest a denaturalization hearing. He is accused over his role as production manager in the underground V-2 plant. It was he who, in April 1943, had “enthusiastically endorsed” the use of prisoners.

The Records

The Justice Department then releases records relating to Rudolph, to von Braun and to the Mittelbau-Dora camp. Von Braun’s SS membership becomes widely known. Communist East Germany had tried to publicize it in the 1960s, with little success in the West. Then, Neufeld writes, thanks to investigative journalists in the 1980s and scholars in the 1990s, “everything” came out about his Nazi record and those of his associates. Belatedly, many became aware of the deaths of thousands of prisoners in the V-2 program and of the potential implication of von Braun, and a few key associates, in those crimes.

NASA itself has changed its language. In the biographical note it devotes to him today, it writes that he “was well aware of the terrible conditions” at the Mittelwerk and “was involved in decision-making about the use of slave labor.”

What the Historians Say

The authors of the official history of the Marshall Center, in 1999, sought a balance. They write that his relationship to the Nazi Party was “complex”: he was not an ardent Nazi, but he did hold rank as an SS officer. And that his relationship to slave labor was “likewise complicated”: his distance from direct responsibility must be balanced by the fact that he was aware of its use and the conditions.

Neufeld, his biographer, ends his 2019 article with a two-part judgment. Von Braun, he writes, was indeed driven by a dream of spaceflight, but he was also a German nationalist who almost effortlessly became an American patriot, and in both cases he had no problem building missiles for his country. He was doubtless an opportunist, but not one completely without principles. He was, in Neufeld’s view, “the most important rocket engineer and space promoter of the twentieth century.” But his legacy “will forever be tarnished by his service to a murderous regime.”

What This Book Retains

This book has not sought to absolve or to condemn. It has reported what the documents say, what von Braun said himself, and what others have said against him. It has pointed out where these accounts disagree.

It retains two facts, which do not cancel each other out. Von Braun’s rockets killed thousands of people, first those who built them, then those they were aimed at. And his rockets carried the first men to the Moon. Both must be kept in mind to understand what he left to those who are preparing for Mars today.

Sources: M. J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun and the Nazis,” PBS, 2019 (A. Rudolph’s departure in 1984, Justice Department records, East German attempt, revelations of the 1980s and 1990s, final judgment); A. Dunar and S. Waring, Power to Explore, ch. I (A. Rudolph’s role in 1943 and in the Saturn program, note 28; judgments on the party and on forced labor); NASA, biographical note “Wernher von Braun.”